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DEPARTMENT OF THE INTERIOR 

FRANKLIN K. LANE. SECRETARY 

t.:, NATIONAL PARK SERVICE 

STEPHEN T. MATHER. DIRECTOR 



GLIMPSES 

of our 

NATIONAL 
PARKS 

By 

ROBERT STERLING YARD 

Executive Secretary, National Paries Association 




Our Wild Animal Sanctuaries 



WASHINGTON 
GOVERNMENT PRLNTING OFFICE 

1920 



THE NATIONAL PARKS AT A GLANCE. 

[Number, 19; total area, 10,859 square miles.] 



National parks in 
order ol creation. 



Hot Springs. 
1832 

Vellowstone . 
1872 



Sequoia. 



1890 



Yosemite 

1890 



General Grant. 
1890 



Middle Arkansas - 



Area in 
square 
miles. 



Mount Rainier. 
1899 



Crater Lake. 
1902 



Northwestern Wyo- 
ming. 



Middle eastern Cali- 
fornia. 



Middle eastern Cali- 
fornia. 



Middle eastern Cali- 
fornia. 



West central AVash- 
ington. 



Southwestern Oregon. 



Distinctive characteristics. 



Wind Cave . - 
1903 



riatt. 



Sullvs Hill... 
1904 



Mesa Verde.. 
1906 



South Dakota. 



Southern Oklahoma. 
North Dakota 



Glacier. 



Rocky Moimtain . 
1915 



Southwestern Colo- 
rado. 

Northwestern Mon- 
tana. 



North middle Colo- 
rado. 



Hawaii . 



46 hot springs possessing curative properties— 
20 batiihouses under public control. 

3 348 More geysers than in all rest of world together— 
' Boihng springs— Mud volcanoes— Petrified for- 

ests—Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, re- 
markable for gorgeous coloring— Large lakes- 
Many large streams and waterfalls— Vast wil- 
derness, greatest wild liird and animal preserve 
in world— Exceptional trout fishing. 

The Big Tree National Park— 12,000 sequoia trees 
over 10 feet in diameter, some 25 to 36 feet in 
diameter— Towering mountam ranges— Spec- 
tacular limestone cave. 

1 125 Valley of world-famed beauty- Lofty cliffs— Ro- 
' maiitic vistas— Many waterfalls of extraor- 

dinary height— 3 groves of big trees- High 
Sierra— Waterwheel falls— Good trout fishing. 

Created to preserve the celebrated General Grant 
Tree, 35 feet in diameter— 6 miles from Sequoia 
National I'ark. 

324 Largest accessible single peak glacier system— 28 
glaciers, some of large size — 18 square miles of 
glacier, 50 to 500 feet tliick— ■\\'onderful sub- 
Alpine wild flower fields. 

Lake of extraordinary blue in crater of extinct 
volcano— Sides 1,000 feet tngh— Interesting lava 
formations— Fine fishing. 

Cavern having many miles of galleries and numer- 
ous chambers contaimng pecuhar lormations. 

li Many sulphur and other springs possessing me- 
dicinal value. 

Small rugged hill containing prehistoric ruins — 
Practically a local park. 

77 Most notable and best preserved prehistoric cliff 
dwellings in United States, if not in the world. 

1 534 Rugged mountain region of unsurpassed Alpine 
character— 250 glacier-fed lakes of romantic 
beauty— 60 small glaciers— Precipices thou- 
sands" of leet deep— Sensational scenery. 

■^98 Heart of the Rockies— Snowy range, peaks 11,000 
to 14.250 feet altitude— Remarkable records of 
glacial period. 



Lassen "V olcanic . 
1916 



Mount McKinley . 
1917 



Grand Canvon 
1919 

Lafavettc 

1919 

Ziou 

1919 



Hawaii 

Northern California. . . 

South cfentral Alaska. 

North central Arizona 

Maine coast.'. 

Southwestern Utah. . 



118 



2,200 



Three separate areas — Kilauea and Mauna Loa oa 
Hawaii; Haleakala on Maui. 

Onlv active volcano in United States proper— 
Lassen Peak 10,465 feet— Cinder Cone 6,87» 
feet— Hot springs— Mud geysers. 

Highest moimtain in North America— Rises 
higher above surroimdmg country than any 
other mountain in the world. 

0;j8 1 The greatest example of erosion and the most 
sublime spectacle in the world. 

The group of granite mountains on Mount Desert 
Island. 

120 Magnificent gorge (Zion Canyon), depth from 
800 to 2,000 feet, with precipitous walls. Of 
great beauty and scenic interest. 



n:* of ^» 

SEP ^^ ia2'i 



-1 



CONTENTS 

Page 

I. The National Parks 5 

II. Yellowstone National Park . . . . . . . .13 

III. Yosemlte National Park 20 

IV. Sequoia and General Grant National Parks ..... 23 
V. Mount Rainier National Park 28 

VI. Crater Lake National Park 33 

VII. Mesa Verde National Park 36 

VIII. Glacier National Park 40 

IX. Rocky Mountain National Park 44 

X. Hawaii National Park 49 

XI. Lassen Volcanic National Park ....... 52 

XII. Mount McKinley National Park 54 

XIII. Grand Canyon National Park ....... 56 

XIV. Lafayette National Park 62 

XV. The Hot Springs Reservation . ' . . . . . .63 

XVI. Zion National Park 66 

XVII. Other National Parks 68 



NOTE TO THE THIRD EDITION 



This booklet was originally ^Yritten in 1915 to meet the demand 
for a simple statement of the characteristics of our principal national 
parks. Previous to its publication there had been no pamphlet for 
popular distribution except information bulletins of individual parks 
confined largely to details of travel. 

The first edition, unillustrated, was issued in the autumn of 1915 
in an edition of 3,000 copies. The second edition, somewhat ampli- 
fied and freely illustrated, was issued May. 1916. Its original print- 
ing order for 1.000 copies was increased to 10,000, then to 100,000, 
then to 300,000, while still in the press. A total of iOO,000 copies has 
been issued. 

The third edition is enlarged to include all national parks. 



DEPARTMENT OF THE INTERIOR 

FRANKLIN K. LANE, Secretary 



NATION.\L PARK SERVICE 

STEPHEN T. IMATHER, Director 



GLIMPSES OF OUR NATIONAL PARKS 

By ROBERT STERLING YARD 



THE NATIONAL PARKS 

THE national parks are areas which Congress has set apart, because 
of extraordinary scenic beauty, remarkable phenomena or other 
unusual qualification, for the use and enjoyment of the people for 
all time. They are administered by the Xational Park Service. 

These are not parks in the common meaning of the word. They are 
not beautiful tracts of cultivated country with smooth lawns and 
winding paths like Central Park in Xew York, or Lincoln Park in 
Chicago, or Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. They are, on the 
contrary, large areas which nature, not man, has made beautiful and 
which the hand of man alters only enough to provide roads to enter 
them, trails to penetrate their fastnesses, and hotels and camps to 
live in. 

There are nineteen national parks, of which twelve or more are of 
the first order of size and scenic magnificence — which means a great 
deal in a land so beautiful as ours. Every person living in the United 
States ought to know much about these twelve or more national parks 
and ought to visit them when possible, for. considered together, they 
contain more features of conspicuous grandeur than are readily acces- 
sible in all the rest of the world together: while, considered indi- 
vidually, there are few, if any, celebrated scenic places within easy 
reach abroad which are not equaled or excelled in America ; even the 
far-famed Swiss Alps are equaled, and. some travelers believe, far 
excelled, by the scenery of several of our own national parks. 

5 



6 OUR NATIONAL PAEKS. 

SCENERY OF THE FIRST ORDER 

At the same time there are many features of American scenery 
which are not to be found anywhere else, or, if found, are unequaled 
abroad in sublimity or beauty. There are more geysers of large size 
in our Yellowstone National Park, for instance, than in all the rest 
of the world together, the nearest approach being the geyser fields 
of Iceland and far New Zealand. Again, it is conceded the world 
over that there is no valley in existence so strikingly beautiful as our 
Yosemite Valley, and nowhere else can be found a canyon of such 
stupendous size and exquisite coloring as our Grand Canyon *of the 
Colorado. In the Sequoia National Park grow trees so huge and old 
that none quite compare with them. Mount McKinley, in Alaska, 
rises 17,000 feet from the ground on which the observer stands to its 
ice-clad' summit among the clouds. These are well-known facts with 
which eveiy American ought to be familiar. 

The twelve national parks of the first order are the ;Mount Rainier 
National Park in Washington, the Crater Lake National Park in 
Oregon, the Yosemite and Sequoia National Parks in California, the 
Glacier National Park in Montana, the Yellowstone National Park, 
principally in Wyoming, the Eocky Mountain and Mesa Verde Na- 
tional Parks in Colorado, the Grand Canyon National Park in 
Arizona, the Mount McKinley National Park in Alaska, the Lafayette 
National Park in Maine, and the Hawaii National Park in the islands 

of Hawaii. 

EACH A PERSONALITY OF ITS OWN 

One of the striking and interesting features of the twelve greater 
national parks of our country is that each one of them is quite dif- 
ferent from all the others ; each has a marked personality of its own. 

Mount Eainier, for instance, is an extinct volcano, down the sides 
of which flow 28 glaciers, or rivers of ice. 

Crater Lake fills with water of astonishing blue the hole left when 
the top of Mount Mazama, another volcano in the same chain as 
Mount Eainier, was swallowed up in some far distant past. 

The Yosemite National Park, in addition to its celebrated Yo- 
semite Valley and lofty waterfalls, has in the north a river called 
the Tuolumne which spouts wheels of water 50 feet and more into 
the air. It has great areas of snow-topped mountains. 

The Sequoia National Park contains more than a million sequoia 
trees, of which 12,000 are more than 10 feet in diameter, and some 
twice that and several from 25 to 36 feet through from side to side. 
Measure 36 feet on the sidewalk and see what that means. Some of 
these trees are older than human history. 

The Glacier National Park was made by the earth cracking in 
some far distant time and one side thrusting up and overlapping the 



OUR NATIONAL PARKS. 




The Highest Waterfall in the World, Yosemite National Park 



The Upper Yosemite Fall drops 1,430 feet sheer, nearly as high as nine Niagaras 
piled one above the other. The Lower Yosemite Fall drops 320 feet. Their 
combined height, including intermediate cascades and rapids, is half a mile. 



8 OUR NATIONAL PARKS. 

other. It has cliffs several thousand feet high and more than 60 
glaciers feed hundreds of lakes. One lake floats icebergs all summer. 

The Yellowstone National Park, beside its geysers, has many hot 
springs which build glistening plateaus of highly colored mineral 
deposits. It has a canyon gorgeous with all the colors and shades 
of the rainbow, and it is literally the greatest wild animal sanctuary. 

The Rocky Mountain National Park straddles the Continental 
Divide at a lofty height, with snow-capped mountains extending 
from end to end. Its glacier records are remarkable. 

The Mesa Verde National Park hides in its barren canyons the 
well-preserved ruins of a civilization which passed out of existence so 
many centuries ago that not even tradition recalls its people. 

The Mount McKinley National Park incloses a mountain higher 
above the near observer than any other mountain in the world; its 
caribou run in herds of 8,000 or more. 

The Hawaii National Park, besides its three volcano peaks, pos- 
sesses a lake of boiling lava which may be photographed at night 
by its own light. 

The Grand Canyon National Park exhibits the mightiest chasm 
by far in the world. It is one of the world's great wonders. 

The Lafayette National Park in Maine exhibits some of the oldest 
granite mountains in America, the only mountains on the Atlantic 
Coast. 

It will be seen that one may visit a new national park each ^-ear 

for more than a decade and see something quite new and remarkable 

at each visit. 

AN ECONOMIC ASSET 

It is plain that our national parks, with very few exceptions, 
have a quality so unusual that they are destined some day to become 
more celebrated internationally than the Swiss Alps are to-day. 
When that time comes, they will constitute an economic asset of in- 
calculable value ; the}^ will become a maker of much good business in 
many lines of industry besides transportation, and a source of enor- 
mous national income. 

Therefore it is good policy faithfully to maintain the trade-mark 
" National Parks of America " at its present high level ; to which 
end wisdom advises against calling new reservations national parks 
whose scenic sublimity falls short of those which now exist. 

HOTELS AND CAMPS. 

The map will show where these national parks are located. All 
of those in the United States are upon lines of railways and are 
easily and comfortably reached from any part of the country. Each 
of them is in charge of a resident superintendent, who has under 
liis charge enough park rangers to protect the forests from fire, the 



OUR NATIONAL PARKS. 



9 



wild animals from liunters, and the visitors from harm. There are 
good roads in all of these parks, and hotels or public camps or both 
^Yhere visitors may stay as loiig as the}^ like to enjoy the scenery and 
study nature. Trails are built to the Avaterfalls, up the highest moun- 
tains, and, in short, wherever 
especially fine views may be 
found. Over these trails 
visitors may walk or ride on 
horseback as they prefer. 

Many of the hotels are fine 
ones where every luxury may 
be had by those who insist 
upon luxuries even in the 
wilderness. There are often 
cheaper hotels also, and in 
the great public camps vis- 
itors may live very comfort- 
ablj^ indeed and quite eco- 
nomicall}'. One may go to 
these camps just as to a hotel, 
only he is assigned a comfort- 
able tent instead of a room, 
and eats his meals in a big 
central building, which also 
serves as a general living 
room. At night a camp fire 
is built in the woods, and all 
gather around it to sing and 
tell stories. Many persons 
who can easily afford the 
luxuries of hotels live in the 
camps because they prefer 
doing so. 

The National Park Service, 
which has all the national 
parks in its care, is trying to 
make them popular and com- 
fortable and available for 
people of all degrees of 
income. 

Xot only should these parks 
bo the best and most fully 
patronized health and pleas- 
ure resorts in the United 
States, but they should also 
become great centers of na- 




Photograph Ijy Pillsbury 

The Largest and Oldest Living Thing 

IN the World 

The General Sherman Tree in the Sequoia 

National Parli;, diameter 3G.5 feet 



10 OUR NATIONAL PARKS. 

ture study. In the national parks only is nature most carefully con- 
served exactly as designed. Xo trees are cut down for lumber, as in 
the national forests outside the parks, but are allowed to reach their 
utmost size and age. Xo animals are killed except mountain lions 
and other predatory beasts which destroy the deer and young elk. 
Here, then, the student and the lover of nature must study nature in 
her pristine beauty and under conditions which elsewhere exist only 
in the few remote lands not yet invaded by man. 

To these national parks, then, the Xational Park Service invites 
the student, amateur, and professional alike. 

NATIONAL PARKS AND NATIONAL FORESTS 

One must not confuse the national forests with the national parks. 
The national forests aggregate many times the area of the national 
parks. They were created to administer lumbering and grazing 
interests for the people; the lumbering, instead of being done by 
private interests often ruthlessly for private profit, as in the past, is 
now done under regulations which conserve the public interest. The 
trees are cut in accordance with the principles of scientific forestry, 
which conserve the smaller trees until they grow to a certain size. 
thus perpetuating the forests. Sheep, horses, or cattle graze in all 
pastures under governmental regulation, while in national parks cattle 
may be admitted only where not detrimental to the enjoyment and 
preservation of the scenery. Regular hunting is permitted in season 
in the national forests, but never in the national parks. In short, 
the national parks, unlike the national forests, are not properties in 
a commercial sense, but natural preserves for the rest, recreation, and 
education of the people. They remain under nature's own chosen 
conditions. They alone maintain "the forest primeval." Congress 
has wisely placed the national parks and national forests under the 
control of different executive bureaus in order that two services 
dealing with areas so similar in kind and location may the more 
surely maintain their individualities and widely different points of 
view. 

'THE NATIONAL MONUMENTS 

Besides the national parks there are many reservations called 
"national monuments," several of which are qualified by size and 
scenic sublimity to be national parks, and all of which, small as 
well as great, are interesting and important. They were created by 
presidential proclamation under the American antiquities act because 
they were " historic landmarks " or " prehistoric structures," or be- 
cause they possessed " historic or scientific interest." 



OUK NATIONAL PARKS. 11 

The difference between a national park and a national monument is 
not always easy to state. A national park is created only by Con- 
gress, with the presumption that it will be developed as a people's 
playground. The presumption in regard to a national monument 
is that it will be conserved and protected only. Both presumptions 
have exceptions, some of them important. Most of the national 
monuments are under the jurisdiction of the Department of the 
Interior, but a few, when created, were put in charge of the War and 
Agriculture Departments. 

HUNTING WITH THE CAMERA 

Lovers of sport also find their national parks rich fields of pleasure, 
provided they do their hunting only with the camera. This is en- 
couraged; and there are no other places in the world where wild 
animals may be approached so closely. In the Yellowstone, where 
shooting has been strictly prohibited since 1894, one may with rea- 
sonable care and precaution photograph deer at close quarters, ap- 
proach elk and antelope and even moose and bison near enough for 
good pictures. 

BIRDS AND WILD ANIMALS 

The lesson of the Yellowstone is that wild animals greatly fear 
man only when man is cruel and murderous. Another lesson from 
national parks experience is that no wild animal will injure human 
beings except in self-defense. The monster cat of our rock fast- 
nesses — the mountain lion — ^big enough and powerful enough to drag 
down a full-grown elk, is one of the most timid of all the beasts in 
the national parks, flying at great speed at the first sight or scent of 
man. 

The national parks cover a great area, 6,949,760 acres in all. If 
all were put together it would mean an area of 10,859 square miles. 

EDUCATIONAL AND INSPIRATIONAL VALUE 

It will be apparent that our national parks serve other and far 
nobler purposes than merely to contribute importantly to the recrea- 
tional opportunity of the people. Of course they are playgrounds of 
high order — the highest order, in fact. But also, and more im- 
portantly, they are museums of the mighty past of the earth's mak- 
ing ; exhibits upon an enormous scale of the operation of the titanic 
forces which shaped and still are shaping this land ; conservation 
areas of the native wild life, animal and vegetable, of America ; and, 
because of these functions, and of their attributes of majesty and 
sublimity besides, they are fountains of inspiration alike to educa- 
tion, patriotism, and the impulses to art and literature. Men return 
from our mountain tops better shopkeepers and tailors, as well as 
better teachers, lawyers, and painters. 



12 OUE 2tatio:n^al parks. 

This is an appropriate place to say that the degree of your enjoy- 
ment of your national parks, and in fact of all natural scenery, will 
depend upon your knowledge of the elementary facts of geology. 
Nothing is more easily and pleasantly acquired, for what most per- 
sons suppose is the dullest of sciences is, in its simplified outlines, one 
of the most interesting to study and fascinating to apply to nature's 
tremendous examples. 

THE ANATOMY OF SCENERY 

Geology is the anatomy of scenery. It is as necessary for the com- 
prehension and appreciation of scenery as a general knowledge of 
anatomy is to the painter of the human figure in action and to the 
critic of his painting. Therefore take with you to your national 
parks some knowledge of the great forces which nature uses in world 
making and how she applies them to the shaping of the several great 
classes into which scenery is divided, and your enjoyment will be in- 
creased many fold. Consider this knowledge as necessary a part of 
your equipment, to be carefully acquired in advance, as your shoes 
and khaki and contour map. 

CONTOUR MAPS 

Xearly all tourists the world over are content to see new places 
without more definite knowledge of locations and bearings than the 
distorted maps of the railroad advertising department or the guess 
of a chance guide. To these I have no message, but to the increasing 
number of orderly minded travelers let me say that the United States 
Geological Survey has made an admirable contour map of each of 
the national parks within the borders of the United States, with the 
aid of which one needs no guide except to make sure of his trail. It 
is easy to learn to read these maps. Every mountain, lake, and 
stream is named, which has an authoritative name, and the contour 
lines conform accurately with the surface, enabling the traveler in- 
stantly to reckon any altitude for himself. The contour-map habit 
is extremely easy to acquire and is the source of keen enjoyment and 
of intimate knowledge which may be obtained in no other way. 

This map may be had from the superintendent of the park, but 
it will save time and trouble to write in advance for it to the United 
States Geological Survey, at Washington, D. C. There is a small 
charge. 

GENERAL INFORMATION BULLETINS 

The following descriptions of some of our national parks are not 
intended to be exhaustive. In each, those characteristics are empha- 
sized which individualize the park, distinguishing it from others. 
Any person who wishes to knoW' more about any national park than 
is here available, who wishes, for instance, to know the particular 



OUR NATIONAL, PAEKS. 13 

traveling and living facilities in eacli and the expense of a visit 
thereto, should write to the Director, National Park Service, Wash- 
ington, D. C, for the General Information Bulletin of the particular 
national park in which he is interested. It will be sent free. 

Those who want information about reaching the national parks 
may write to the United States Eailroad Administration Bureau of 
Service, National Parks and Monuments, 646 Transportation Build- 
ing, Chicago, 111. 

II 

THE YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK 

Special Characteristics: Geysers and Hot Springs; Wonderfully Colored 
Canyon; Largest Wild Bird and Animal Kefuge 

THE Yellowstone National Park, which lies principally in Wyo- 
ming, is the most widely celebrated of all our national parks 
because it contains more and greater geysers than all the rest of the 
world together. The geyser fields next in size are in Iceland and 
New Zealand. The rest are inconspicuous. 

To comprehend what we have in Yellowstone, we must begin with 
its making. The entire region is of volcanic origin. The mountains 
around it on both sides and the mountains within it are products or 
lemainders of great volcanoes of the far past ; and the great plateaus, 
from wliich spring its geysers and hot springs and through whose 
forests now roam so many wild animals, are composed of the ash 
and disintegrated lavas which were once ejected from these volcanoes. 

One peculiarly fascinating glimpse of Yellowstone's tempestuous 
past is atforded in the petrified forest of the Specimen Ridge 
neighborhood, where many levels of upright petrified trunks may be 
found alternating, like the layers in a cake, with levels of lava; 
which plainly shows that after the first forest grew on the volcano's 
slope and was engulfed by a fresh run of lava, enough time elapsed 
for a second forest to grow upon that level, and that this in turn 
was engulfed with new lava to make the level for another forest, and 
so on. There is a cliff 2.000 feet high composed wholly of these 
alternate levels of engulfed forests and the lavas wliich engulfed 
them. 

THE GEYSERS 

Geysers are, roughly speaking, water volcanoes. They occur only 
at places where the internal heat of the earth approaches close to 
the surface. Their action, for so many years unexplained and even 
now regarded Avith wonder by so many, is simple. Water from the 
surface trickling through cracks in the rocks, or water from subter- 



14 OUK NATIONAL PAEKS. 

ranean springs collecting in the bottom of the geyser's crater, down 
among the strata of intense heat, becomes itself intensely heated and 
gives off steam, which expands and forces upward the cooler water 
that lies above it. This makes room for the more rapid formation of 
steam which immediately gathers under enormous pressure. 

It is then that the water at the surface of the geyser begins to bub- 
ble and give off clouds of steam, the sign to the watchers above that 
the geyser is about to play. 

At last the water in the bottom reaches so great an expansion 
under continued heat that the less heated water above can no longer 
wei^ it down, so it bursts upward with great violence, rising many 
feet in the air and continuing to play until practically all the water 
in the crater has been expelled. Spring water, or the same water 
cooled and falling back to the ground, again seeps through the sur- 
face to gather as before in the crater's depth, and in a greater or less 
time, according to difficulties in the way of its return, becomes 
reheated to the bursting point, when the geyser spouts again. 

One may make a geyser with a test tube and a Bunsen burner. The 
National Park Service has built a small model geyser mounted 
on a wooden table which, when heat is applied to the metal retort on 
the floor, plays at regular intervals of about a minute and a quarter. 
The same water returns again and again to the retort, becomes re- 
heated, and is again spouted into the air. This model, by the way, 
has been named Young Faithful. 

THE HOT- WATER PHENOMENA 

Nearly the entire Yellowstone region, covering an area of about 
3,300 square miles, is remarkable for its hot-water phenomena. The 
geysers are confined to three basins lying near each other in the 
middle west side of the park, but other hot water manifestations 
occur at more widely separated points. Marvelously colored hot 
springs, mud volcanoes, and other strange phenomena are frequent. 
At Mammoth Hot Springs the hot water has brought to the sur- 
face quantities of white mineral deposits which build terraces of 
beautifull}' incrusted basins high up into the air, often engulfing 
trees of considerable size. Over the edges of these carved basins 
pours the hot water. Microscopic plants called algae gi-ow on the 
edges and sides of these basins, assisting the deposition of the 
mineral matter and painting them hues of red and pink and bluish 
gray, which in warm weather glow brilliantly, but in cold weather 
almost disappear. At many other points lesser hot springs occur, 
introducing strange, almost uncanny, elements into wooded and 
otherwise quite normal landscapes. 



OUR NATIONAL PARKS. 



15 




Photograph by J. E. Haynes, St. Paul 

Old Faithful Geysee, Yellowstone National Paek 



16 OUR NATIONAL PARKS. 

A tour of these hot-water formations and spouting geysers is an 
experience never to be forgotten. Some of the geysers play at quite 
regular intervals. For many years the celebrated Old Faithful 
played about every 70 minutes, but during the summer of 1915 the 
interval lengthened to about 85 minutes, due to the small snowfall 
and consequent lessened water supply of the preceding winter; the 
next year, with a return of normal snowfall, the geyser resumed its 
usual intervals. Some of the largest geysers play at irregular inter- 
vals of days, weeks, or months. Some very small ones play every 
few minutes. Many bubbling hot springs, which throw water 2 
or 3 feet into the air once or twice a minute, are really small, im- 
perfectly formed geysers. 

The hot-spring terraces are also a rather awe-inspiring spectacle 
wdien seen for the first time. The visitor may climb upon them and 
pick his way around among the steaming pools. In certain lights 
the surface of these po,ols appears vividly colored. The deeper hot 
j)ools are often intensely green. The incrustations are often beauti- 
fully crystallized. Clumps of grass, and even flowers, which have 
been submerged in the charged waters become exquisitely plated, as 
if with frosted silver. 

But the geysers and hot-water formations are by no means the 
only wonders in the Yellowstone. Indeed the entire park is a won- 
derland. The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone affords a spectacle 
worthy of a national park were there no geysers. But you must 
not confuse your Grand Canyons, of which there are several in our 
wonderful western country. Of these, by far tlie largest and most 
impressive is the Grand Canyon of the Colorado River, in Arizona. 
That is the one always meant when people speak of visiting " the 
Grand Canyon," without designating a location. It is the giant of 
canyons. 

GRAND CANYON OF THE YELLOWSTONE 

The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone is altogether different. 
Great though its size, it is much the smaller of the two. What makes 
it a scenic feature of the first order is its marvelously variegated 
coloring. It is the cameo of canyons. 

Standing upon Inspiration Point, which pushes out almost to the 
center of the canyon, one seems to look almost vertically down upon 
the foaming Yellowstone River. To the south a waterfall nearly 
twice the height of Niagara rushes seemingly out of the pine-clad 
hills and pours downward to be lost again in green. 

From that point 2 or 3 miles to where you stand and beneath 
you widens out the most glorious kaleidoscope of color you will ever 
see in nature. The steep slopes dropping on either side a thousand 
feet and more from the pine-topped levels above are inconceivably 



OUR NATIONAL PARKS. 



17 




rhotograph by J. E. Haynes, St. Paul 

The Gorgeously Colored Caxyon, Yellowstone National Park 

Showing the Great Falls of the Yellowstone. 308 feet high. 

carved and fretted by the frost and the erosion of the ages. Some- 
times they lie in straight lines at easy angles, from which jut high 
rocky prominences. Sometimes they lie in huge hollows carved from 
the side walls. Here and there jagged rocky needles rise perpendicu- 
larly for hundreds of feet like groups of gothic spires. 

And the whole is colored as brokenly and vividly as the field of a 
kaleidoscope. The whole is streaked and spotted and stratified in 
every shade from the deepest orange to the faintest lemon, from deep 
crimson through all the brick shades to the softest pink, from black 
through all the grays and pearls to glistening white. The greens are 
furnished by the dark pines above, the lighter shades of growth 
caught here and there in soft masses on the gentler slopes and the 
125862°— 20 2 



18 OUR NATIONAL PARKS. 

foaming green of the plunging river so far below. The blues, ever 
changing, are found in the dome of the sky overhead. 

It is a spectacle which one looks upon in silence. 

There are several spots from which fine partial views maj' be had, 
but no person can say he has seen the canyon who has not stood upon 
Inspiration Point. Eemember this when you visit the Yellowstone. 

WILD ANIMALS LIVING NATURALLY 

Another interesting feature of the Yellowstone National Park is its 
wild-animal life. It is the largest and most successful preserve in the 
world. Its 3,300 square miles of mountains and valleys remain nearly 
as nature made them, for the 200 miles of roads and the four hotels 
and five camps arc as nothing in this immense wilderness. No 
tree has been cut except when absolutely necessary for road or trail 
or camp. No herds invade its valleys. No rifle has been fired at a 
wild animal since 1894, except by occasional poachers along the 
border and by the official destroyers of predatory beasts. 

Visitors for the most part keep to the beaten road, and the wild 
animals have learned in the years that they mean them no harm. To 
be sure, they are seldom seen from automobiles, the noise and odor of 
which tend to keep them back from the roads; or b}' the people filling 
the long trains of stages which travel from point to point daily during 
the season : but the quiet watcher on the trails may see deer and bear 
and elk and antelope to his heart's content, and he may even see 
mountain sheep, moose, and bison by journeying on foot or by horse- 
back into their distant retreats. In the fall and spring, when the 
crowds are absent, wild deer gather in great numbers at the hotel 
clearings to crop the grass, and the rangers' children feed them 
flowers. One of the diversions at the road builders' camps in the 
wilderness is cultivating the acquaintance of the animals. There are 
photographs of men feeding sugar to bear cubs while mother bear 
looks idly on. 

Thus one of the most interesting lessons from the Yellowstone is 
that wild animals are fearful and dangerous only when men treat 
them as game or as enemies. 

BEARS, ELK, MOOSE, DEER, ANTELOPE, AND BISON 

The grizzly bear, for instance, is one of the shyest of wild animals, 
and may be seen only with difficulty. It lives principally on roots, 
berries, nuts, and honey — when honey ma}^ be had. It can not climb 
trees like the brown bears. Its little ones are born in caves where 
bears hibernate through the winters and are little larger than squir- 
rels when they first come into the world. 

The brown, cinnamon, and black bears, which, by the way, are the 
same species only differently colored — the blondes and brunettes, so 



OUR NATIONAL PARKS. 19 




Pbotograph by G. Swanson 

Mule Deeb, Yellowstone National Park. 

to speak, of the same bear family — are quite different. They are 
playful, comparatively fearless, sometimes even friendly. They are 
greedy fellows and steal camp supplies whenever they can. The 
large meat wagons which carry supplies to the distant hotels and 
camps overnight are equipped with iron covers, because the bears 
used to rip off the wooden tops during the resting times and run off 
with sides of beef and mutton. One night several years ago team- 
sters drove three bears from the top of a single one of these big 
wagons. 

This wild animal paradise contains 30,000 elk, several thousand 
moose, innumerable deer, many antelope, and a large and increasing 
herd of wild bison. 

It is an excellent bird preserve also; more than 150 species live 
natural, undisturbed lives. Eagles abound among the crags. Wild 
geese and ducks are plentiful. Many thousands of large white peli- 
cans add to the picturesqueness of Yellowstone Lake. 

A CLIMAX IN GRANITE 

In magnificent contrast with the volcanic plateau and its border 
of volcanic mountains there rises from the plains, 30 miles to the 
south, one of the most abrupt and stupendous outcroppings of granite 
in the Western Hemisphere. From the western shore of Jackson 
Lake the Teton Mountains lift their spired peaks 7,000 feet in appar- 
ent perpendicular. Many glaciers rest upon their shoulders. Their 
climax is the Grand Teton, whose altitude is 13,717 feet. 

Thus does the Yellowstone run the scenic gamut. 

Once Jackson's Hole, as this region is still popularly called, was 
the refuge for the hunted desperado of mountain, plain, and city. 
In the recesses of these granite monsters he was safe from pursuit. 



20 OUR NATIONAL, PAEKS. 

and the elk herds of the plains provided him food. But that pic- 
turesque period of American life has passed with the warring 
Indians who also here found temporary safe retreat. 

DISCOVEBY OF THE YELLOWSTONE 

The first recorded visit to the Yellowstone was made by John 
Colter in 1810. He was returning home alone from the Lewis and 
Clark expedition and took refuge there from hostile Indians. His 
story of its wonders was discredited. 

The next recorded visit was by a trapper named Joseph Meek in 
1829, Avho described it as " a country smoking with vapor from boil- 
ing springs and burning with gases issuing from small craters." 
From some of these craters, he said, " issued blue flame and molten 
brimstone," which, of course, was not true, though doubtless Meek 
fully believed it to be the truth. 

Between 1830 and 1840 Warren Angus Ferris, a clerk in the 
American Fur Co., wrote the first description of the Firehole Geyser 
Basin, but it was not until 1852 that the geyser district was actually 
defined and the geysers precisely located. This was done by Father 
De Smet, the famous Jesuit missionary. 

It remained for a Government expedition, sent out in 1859 under 
command of Capt. W. F. Raynolds, to first really explore and chart 
the region. Several private explorers followed, but so great was 
public incredulity as to the marvels they described that they did not 
dare tell their experiences before any general audiences, for several 
lecturers had been stoned in the streets as impostors. The large 
exploring expedition under Henry D. Washburn and N. P. Langford, 
in 1870, finally established the facts to the public belief and led to 
the creation of the Yellowstone National Park. 

Ill 

THE YOSEMITE NATIONAL PARK 

Special Characteristics: Sensationally Beautiful Valley and Spectacular 

Waterfalls 

THE Yosemite National Park lies west of the crest of the Sierra 
Nevada Mountains in middle eastern California. The famous 
Yosemite Valley is a small part of this extraordinary holida}' 
garden — a mere crack 7 or 8 miles long by less than 1 mile wide 
in 1,125 miles of scenic wilderness so beautiful and varied that 
adequate description reads like romance. 

The irregular eastern boundary is the crest of the Sierra, a ram- 
part of tremendous granite peaks buttressed by pinnacled spurs of 
nature's noblest gothic, spattered by snow fields and mimic glaciers, 



OUR I^ATIONAL, PAEKS. 



21 




Bird's-eye view of Yosemite Valley looking eastwarrl to the crest of the Sierra 

Nevada. 



1. 


Clouds Rest. 


17. 


2 


Half Dome. 


18. 


3. 


jNIount Watkins. 


19. 


4. 


Basket Dome. 


20. 


5. 


North Dome. 


21. 


6. 


Washington Column. 


oo 


7. 


Iloyal Arches. 


23. 


8. 


Mirror Lake and mouth of Tenaya 


24. 




Canyon. 


25. 


9. 


Camp Curry, 




30. 


Yosemite Village. 


2G. 


11. 


Sentinel Bridge. 


27. 


12. 


New Camp Yosemite. 


28. 


13. 


Head of Yosemite Falls. 


29. 


14. 


Eagle Peak (the Three Brothers) . 


30. 


15. 


El Capitan. 


31. 


16. 


Ribbon Falls. 


32. 



Merced River. 

El Capitan Bridge and Moraine. 

Big Oak Flat Road. 

Wawona Road. 

Bridalveil Falls. 

Cathedral Rocks. 

Cathedral Spires. 

Sentinel Rock. 

Glacier Point and new Glacier Point 

Hotel. 
Glacier Point Road- 
Sentinel Dome. 
Liberty Cap. 
Mount Broderick. 
Little Yosemite Valley. 
Tenaya Lake Lodge. 
Merced Lake Lodge. 



22 OUR NATIOiSTAL PARKS. 

a mountain barrier uncrossable by road except at one point, lofty 
Tioga Pass. Westward from the perpetual snows of this stupendous 
wall flow a million streams, which converge in two river systems 
watering and beautifying the inimitable pleasure ground. One of 
these streams passes through that gorge of great celebrity, the Hetch 
Hetchy Valley; the other flows through that gorge of greatest 
celebrity, the Yosemite Valley. 

The park includes, in John Muir's words, " the headwaters of the 
Tuolumne and Merced Eivers, two of the most songful streams 
in the world; innumerable lakes and waterfalls and smooth, silky 
lawns; the noblest forests, the, loftiest granite domes, the deepest 
ice-cidptured canyons, the brightest crystalline pavements, and 
snowy mountains soaring into the sky twelve and thirteen thousand 
feet, arrayed in open ranks and spiry pinnacled groups partially 
separated by tremendous canyons and amphitheaters; gardens on 
their sunny brows, avalanches thundering down their long white 
slopes, cataracts roaring gray and foaming in the crooked rugged 
gorges, and glaciers in their shadowy recesses working in silence, 
slowly completing their sculptures ; new-born lakes at their feet, blue 
and green, free or encumbered with drifting icebergs like miniature 
Arctic Oceans, shining, sparkling, calm as stars." 

This land of enchantments is a land of enchanted climate. Its 
summers are warm, but not too warm; drj^, but not too dry; its 
nights cold and marvelously starry. 

THE VALLEY AND ITS WATERFALLS 

Most persons, even visitors, know only the Yosemite Valley. And, 
indeed, were there nothing else, the valley itself, small though it is, 
would stand in the first rank of national parks. It was discovered 
in 1851, by mounted volunteers pursuing Indians into their fast- 
nesses. Because of its extraordinary character and quite exceptional 
beauty it quickly became celebrated; but it was not until 1874 that 
a road was built into it. Until then it was approached only by trail. 

No matter what their expectation, most visitors are delightfully 
astonished upon entering the Yosemite Valley. The sheer immensity 
of the precipices on either side of the valley's peaceful floor; the 
loftiness and the romantic suggestion of the numerous waterfalls; 
the majesty of the granite walls ; and the unreal, almost fairy quality 
of the ever- varying whole can not be successfully foretold. 

After the visitor has recovered from his first shock of astonish- 
ment — for it is no less — at the supreme beauty of the valley, inevi- 
tably he wonders how Nature made it. However did it happen 
that walls so enormous rose so nearly perpendicular from so level a 
floor. 



OUR NATIONAL, PAEKS. 



23 



It will not lessen wonder to learn that it was water which cut 
most of this deep valley in the solid granite. Originally the Merced 
River flowed practically at the level of the canyon top. How long it 
took its waters, enormous in volume then, no doubt, to scrape with 
tools of sand and rock carried down from the High Sierra, this val- 
ley thousands of feet into the living granite, no man can even guess. 
And, as it cut the valley, it left the tributary streams sloping even 
more sharply from their levels until eventually they poured over 
brinks as giant waterfalls. 

The recent investigations of the United States Geological Survey 
have determined that the river did by far the most of the work, and 
that the great glaciers which 
followed the water ages after- 
wards did not a great deal 
more than square its corners 
and steepen its cliffs. It may 
have increased the depth from 
700 to 1,200 feet, scarcely 
more. 

During the uncountable 
years since the glaciers van- 
ished, erosion has again mar- 
velously used its w o n d e r 
chisel. With the lessening 
of the Merced's volume, the 
effect was no longer to deepen 
the channel but to amazingly 
carve and decorate the walls. 

The manner of its making- 
explains the extreme loftiness 
of the waterfalls which pour 
over the rim into the valley. 

The Yosemite Falls, for 
instance, drops 1,430 feet in 
one sheer fall, a height equal 
to nine Niagara Falls piled 
one on top of the other. The Lower Yosemite Fall, immediately be- 
low^, has a drop of 320 feet, or two Niagaras more. Vernal Fall has 
the same height, while Illilouette Fall is 50 feet higher. The Nevada 
Fall drops 594 feet sheer; the celebrated Bridalveil Fall 620 feet, 
while the Eibbon Fall, highest of all, drops 1,612 feet sheer, a 
straight fall ten times as great as Niagara. Nowhere else in the 
world may be had a water spectacle such as this. 

Similarly the sheer summits. Cathedral Rocks rise 2,500 feet per- 
pendicular from the valley; El Capitan, 3,604 feet; Sentinel Dome, 
4,157 feet; Half Dome, 4,892 feet; Clouds Rest, 5,964 feet. 




Photograph by Lindloy Eddy 

Common Black oe Bkown Bear 



24 



OUR NATIONAL PARKS. 



Among these monsters the Merced sings its winding way. 

The falls are at their fullest in May and June while the winter 
snows are melting. They still have volume in July, but after that 
they decrease rapidly. But let it not be supposed that their beauty 
depends upon the amount of water that pours over their brinks. It 
is true that the rush of water in the Yosemite Falls is even a little 
appalling in May, that sometimes the ground trembles half a mile 
away. But it is equally true that in September when, in specially 
dry seasons, much of the water of the great fall reaches the bottom 
in the shape of mist, the spectacle still possesses a filmy grandeur 
not comparable, perhaps, to any sight on earth. The one inspires 
wonder by its immensity and power ; the other uplifts by its intan- 
gible spirit of sheer beauty. 



ABOVE THE VALLEY'S RIM 

The enormous park area above the vallej^'s rim is less celebrated 
principally because it is less known. The acquisition and repair by 
the Govermnent in 1915 of the old Tioga Road across the park and 
over the Sierra through Tioga Pass made it accessible, and now 
trails lead from public camps into the fastnesses of the High Sierra, 
making available to the camper-out hundreds of limpid lakes and 
rushing trout streams set in a land of delight. 

And thus is added to the amazing water spectacle for which the 
valley is famous still another kind of Yosemite waterfall destined 
to world-wide celebrity. The Tuolumne River, descending sharply 
to the head of the Hetch Hetchy Valley, becomes, in John Muir's 




rii..n-,'iai'li l'> W". 1.. Ih:: ' ; , 

Waterwheels in the Tuolumne River, Yosemite National Park. 
The sloping current, striking projecting rocks, rises 50 feet or more in the air. 



OUR ISTATIONAL PARKS. 25 

phrase, " one wild, exulting, onrushing mass of snowy purple bloom 
spreading over glacial waves of granite without any definite channel, 
gliding in magnificent silver plumes, dashing and foaming through 
huge bowlder dams, leaping high in the air in wheel-like whirls, dis- 
playing glorious enthusiasm, tossing from side to side, doublinir, 
glinting, singing in exuberance of mountain energy." 

The crowning feature of this mad spectacle are the water wheels 
which rise 50 feet or more into the air when the slanting river strikes 
obstructions. 

In addition to its many other attractions, the Yosemite National 
Park contains three groves of sequoias, the celebrated "Big Trees of 
California." One of these trees, the Grizzly Giant, has a diameter 
of 29.6 feet and a height of 204 feet. It is more than 3,000 years old. 
The automobile road passes through an opening in the trunk of 
another, the Wawona Tree. Still another living tree is hollow from 
bottom to top, so that one may step within it and, gazing upward, 
see the sky as through a tube. A few hours in the red silence of 
the Mariposa Grove is an experience never to be forgotten. 

Living in the Yosemite is extremely comfortable. There are two 
hotels and several public camps. There are grounds where many 
persons maintain private camps. The valley is the northern ter- 
minus of the John Muir Trail which California has built southward 
along the crest of the Sierra as a memorial to her famous man of 
letters. 

IV. 

THE SEQUOIA NATIONAL PARK 

Special Characteristic : Largest and Oldest Trees in the "World 

AND they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower whose top 
may reach unto heaven. 

Thus is recoixled, in the eleventh chapter of Genesis, the building 
of the Tower of Babel. While this tower was doubtless still standing, 
and a hundred years or two before the birth of Abraham, a tiny seed 
in the warm soil of a mountain slope on quite the opposite side of the 
world thrust into the light of day a slender green spike which was 
destined, during an existence of more than 4,000 years, to become 
itself a lofty tower; noble in form, "with a physiognomy almost 
Godlike," as John Muir puts it, pulsating with life to its topmost 
leaflet more than 300 feet above the ground, and giving forth a babel 
of bird song to the accompaniment which the sunnner winds played 
upon its many millions of tiny leaves. 

On the stump of this prostrate sequoia tree, one of the noblest of 
the celebrated Big Trees of California, John Muir counted more than 
4,000 rings, a ring for every year of its life. Its trunk, exclusive 



26 



OUR NATIONAL PARKS. 



of bark, was 35 feet 8 inches in diameter. As the bark of the very 
largest sequoias is 2 feet or more in thickness, this giant must liave 
measured 40 feet in diameter when it was still growing on one of the 
slopes of the Kings River. 

LARGEST OF THE MONSTERS 

In the Sequoia National Park, upon the upper slopes of the Sierra 
Nevada in central California, and in the little General Grant 
National Park, 6 miles away and under the same management, grow 
more than a million sequoia trees, of which 12,000 are more than 10 
feet in diameter. Some of the others have these dimensions: 

General Sherman Tree : Diameter, 36.5 feet ; height, 279.9 feet. 

General Grant Tree: Diameter, 35 feet; height, 264 feet. 

Abraham Lincoln Tree: Diameter, 31 feet; height, 270 feet. 

California Tree: Diameter, 30 feet; height, 260 feet. 

George Washington Tree : Diameter, 29 feet ; height, 255 feet. 

William McKinley Tree: Diameter, 28 feet; height, 291 feet. 

Dalton Tree: Diameter, 27 feet ;_ height, 292 feet. 
There are sequoia trees of great size in several other parts of 
California also, notably in the Yosemite National Park, where three 
distinct groves are found; but by far the greatest number, and the 




Photograph by J. E. Roberts. 

Picnic Party Among the Big Tkees of Sequoia National Fakk. 



OUR NATIONAL PAEKS. 27 

individual trees of greatest size, are in the Sequoia National Park 
and its little neighbor. 

It will help your comprehension of the great size of these trees to 
know that a box big enough to have easily held the ill-fated ship 
Ludtarda^ one of the largest ever built, could be made from inch 
boards sawed from any one of these great sequoias, with boards 
enough left over to build a dozen houses. Automobiles and six-horse 
teams have been driven up and down the fallen trunks of several 
great sequoias, and there are regular wagon roads running through 
gaps in the trunks of several others in our national parks. Two 
parallel street car lines and a driveway might be run through the 
trunks of several of the very largest. 

THE OLDEST LIVING THING 

But the age of the sequoia is still more difficult to realize. It is 
beyond compare the oldest living thing. 

Several of the trees now growing in hearty maturity in the Sequoia 
National Park were vigorous youngsters before the pyramids were 
built on the Egyptian desert before Babylon reached its prime. 
Hundreds of them were thriving before the heroic ages of ancient 
Greece — while, in fact, the rough Indo-Germanic ancestors of the 
Greeks were still swarming from the north. Thousands were lusty 
youths through all the ages of Greek art and Eoman wars. Tens of 
thousands were flourishing trees when Christ was born in Bethlehem. 

But with all its vast age the sequoia to-day is the embodiment of 
serene vigor. No description, says Muir, can give any adequate idea 
of its majesty, much less its beauty. He calls it nature's forest mas- 
terpiece. He dwells upon its patrician bearing, its suggestion of 
ancient stock, its strange air of other days, its thoroughbred look 
inherited from the long ago. " Poised in the fullness of strength and 
beauty, stern and solemn in mien, it glows with eager enthusiastic 
life to the tip of every leaf and branch and far-reaching root, calm 
as a granite dome, the first to feel the touch of the rosy beams of 
morning, the last to bid the sun good night." 

The sequoia is regular and symmetrical in general form. Its pow- 
erful, stately, trunk is purplish to cinnamon brown and rises without 
a branch a hundred or a hundred and fifty feet — which is as high or 
higher than the tops of most forest trees. Its bulky limbs shoot 
boldly out on every side. Its foliage, the most feathery and delicate 
of all the conifers, is densely massed. The bright green cones are 
about 2| inches long, generating seeds scarcely more than an eighth of 
an inch across. The wood is almost indestructible, except by fire. 
Fallen trunks and broken branches lie for centuries undecayed and 
almost unaltered. 



28 OUR NATIONAL PAEKS. 

The sequoias are the glory, as they were the cause, of the Sequoia 
National Park. Scattered here and there over great areas, they 
cluster chiefly in 13 separate groves, and it is in these groves that 
they attain their greatest size and luxuriance. 

But they are by no means the only attractions of this national park, 
which many frequenters declare nature has equipped best of all for 
the jo3'S and pleasures of mountain living. 

THE PROPOSED ROOSEVELT NATIONAL PARK 

The Giant Forest is not only an objective; it is a gateway, also. 
From its deep, still shadows ,the traveler may pass northward and 
eastward into an area of mountain-top sublimity unsurpassed even 
in America. The streams which water the sequoias flow from the 
everlasting snows which decorate the peaked and castellated granite 
summits of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Up into these fastnesses 
lead the eastern trails, even to the top of Mount Wliitney, highest 
point in the United States. And into the Tehipite Valley and the 
Kings Eiver Canyon lead the northern trails, valleys of stupendous 
ruggedness and wild beauty destined some day to be a celebrity, 
each, in its own way, comparable only to Yosemite's. 

This region, which is included in the proposed Roosevelt National 
Park, is as tremendous in its own way as is the Giant Forest. Each 
attains its own manner of supremac3\ Together, from Giant Forest 
to Sierra summit, they run the gamut of the sublime. 

V 
THE MOUNT RAINIEK, NATIONAL PARK 

Special Characteristic : Complicated Glacial System Flowing' f rom^ One Peak 

IN the northwestern corner of the United States rises, from the 
Cascade Mountains, a series of extinct volcanoes ice-clad from 
summit to foot the year around. Foremost among them, counting 
from south to north, are Mount Shasta in California ; Mount Hood in 
Oregon; INIount St. Helens, Mount Adams, Mount Rainier, and 
Mount Baker in "Washington. Once, in the dim ages when America 
was making, they blazed across the sea like huge beacons. To-day, 
their fires quenched, they suggest a stalwart band of Knights of the 
Ages, helmeted in snow, armored in ice, standing at parade upon a 
carpet patterned gorgeously in wild flowers. 

Easily chief of this knightly band is Mount Rainier, a giant tower- 
ing 14,408 feet above tidewater in Puget Sound. Home-bound 
sailors far at sea mend their courses from his silver summit. Travel- 
ers overland catch the sun glint from his shining sides at a distance 
«cf more than 150 miles. 



OUR NATIONAL. PARKS. 



29 



This mountain has a glacier system far exceeding in size and im- 
pressive beauty that of any other in tlie United States. From its 
summit and cirques 28 named rivers of ice pour slowly down its 
sides. There are others unnamed. Seen upon the map, as if from 




Photograph by llerberl \\. Gkasou. 

Tehipite Dome, Proposed Roosevelt National Paek. 

It rises abruptly more than 3,000 feet above the floor of Tehipite Valley. 



30 OUR NATIOISTAL. PAKKS. 

an aeroplane, one thinks of it as an enormous frozen octopus stretch- 
ing icy tentacles clown upon every side among the rich gardens of 
wild flowers and splendid forests of fir and cedars below„ 

BIRTH OF THE GLACIERS 

Every winter the moisture-laden winds from the Pacific, suddenly 
cooled against its summit, deposit upon its top and sides enormous 
snows. These, settling in the mile-wide crater which was left after 
a great explosion in some prehistoric age carried away perhaps 2,000 
feet of the volcano's former height, press with overwhelming weight 
down the mountain's sloping sides. 

Thus are born the glaciers, for the snow under its own pressure 
quickly hardens into ice. Through 28 valleys, self-carved in the 
solid rock, flow these rivers of ice, as they may be roughly called, 
now turning, as rivers of water turn, to avoid the harder rock strata, 
now roaring over precipices like congealed waterfalls, now rippling, 
like water currents, over rough bottoms, pushing, pouring relentlessly 
on until they reach those parts of their courses where warmer air 
turns them into rivers of water. 

There are 48 square miles of these glaciers, ranging in width from 
500 feet to a full mile and in thickness from 50 feet to many hun- 
dreds, perhaps even more than a thousand feet. 

ONCE WAS 2,000 FEET HIGHER 

Mount Rainier is nearly 3 miles high, measured from sea level. 
It rises nearly 2 miles above its immediate base. Once it was a 
complete cone like the famous Fujiyama, the sacred mountain of 
Japan. Then it was probably 16,000 feet high. " Then," says 
Matthes, " a great explosion followed tJiat destroyed the top part 
of the mountain and reduced its height by some 2,000 feet. The 
volcano was left beheaded." 

Indian legends tell of a great eruption. 

The National Park, which incloses Mount Ranier, is about 18 
miles square, containing 324 square miles. It is easily reached b}^ 
railroad and automobile from neighboring cities. A new automobile 
road enables stages to bring visitors to beautiful Paradise Valley, 
Avhose flowered slopes are bordered by the great Nisqually, Paradise, 
and Stevens Glaciers. One may reach this point in four hours from 
Tacoma and return the same day. But it is a spot where the vis- 
itor may well spend weeks. 

The Nisqually Glacier is the best known though by no means the 
largest of the glaciers. It is 5 miles long and at Paradise Valley 
is half a mile wide. Glistening white and fairly smooth at its shin- 



OUE NATIONAL PARKS. 



31 




Photograph by Curtis & Miller, Seattle. 

The Kautz Glacier, Mount Rainier National Park. 
Showing its winding course from its Cirque near tbe Summit. 

ing source on the mountain's summit, its surface here is soiled with 
dust and broken stone and squeezed and rent by terrible pressure 
into fantastic shapes. Innumerable crevasses or cracks many feet 
deep break acro&s it, caused by the more rapid movement of the 
glacier's middle than its edges; for glaciers, again like rivers of 
water, develop swifter currents nearer midstream. 

Professor Le Conte tells us that the movement of Nisqually Glacier 
in summer averages, at midstream, about 16 inches a clay. It is far 



32 



OUR KATTOTvTAT^ PARKS. 




Photograph by Curtis & Miller, Seattle. 

Mount Rainier, Showing Beginning of Nisqually Glacier. 
View from wild-flower-carpeted Paradise Valley. 

less at the margins, its speed being retarded by the friction of the 
sides. 

It is one of the great pleasures of a visit to Mount Rainier National 
Park to wander over the fields of snow and climb out on the Nis- 
qually Glacier and explore its crevasses and ice caves. 

Like all glaciers, the Nisqually gathers on its surface masses of 
rock with which it strews its sides just as rivers of water strew their 
banks with logs and floating debris. These are called lateral 
moraines, or side moraines. Sometimes glaciers build lateral 
moraines miles long and many feet high, as you will see when you 
visit the Mount Rainier National Park. 

The rocks which are carried in midstream to the end of the glacier 
and dropped when the ice melts form a terminal moraine. 

The end, or snout, of the glacier thus always lies among a great 
mass of rocks and stones. The Nisqually River flows from a cave in 
the end of the Nisqually Glacier's snout, for the melting begins miles 
upstream under the glacier. The river is the color of the rock when 



OUR NATIONAL PARKS. 33 

it first appears because it carries sediment and powdered rock, which, 
however, it deposits in time, becoming quite clear. 

There are many glaciers as large and larger than the Nisqually, 
but they are little laiowL' because so hard to reach. The National 
Park Service has now completed trails around the great ice moun- 
tain and all of these glaciers are now accessible. 

CREATURES LIVING IN THE ICE 

Many interesting things might be told of these glaciers were there 
space. For example, several species of minute insects live in the 
ice, hopping about like tiny fleas. They are harder to see than the 
so-called sand fleas at the seashore because much smaller. Slender, 
dark-brown worms live in countless millions in the surface ice. 
Microscopic rose-colored plants also thrive in such great numbers 
that they tint the surface here and there, making what is commonly 
called " red snow." 

GORGEOUS CARPETING OF FLOWERS 

But this brief picture of the Mount Rainier National Park would 
miss its loveliest touch without some notice of the wild-flower parks 
lying at the base, and often reaching far up between the icy fingers 
of Mount Rainier. Paradise Valley, Indian Henrys Hunting 
Ground, Spray Park, Summerland — such are the names given to 
some of these beauty spots. 

Let John Muir, the celebrated naturalist, describe them here. 

"Above the forests," he writes, " there is a zone of the loveliest 
flowers, 50 miles in circuit and nearly 2 miles wide, so closely 
planted and luxuriant that it seems as if nature, glad to make an 
open space between woods so dense and ice so deep, were econo- 
mizing the precious ground and trying to see how many of her 
darlings she can get together in one mountain wreath — daisies, ane- 
mones, geraniums, columbine, erythroniums, larkspurs, etc., among 
which we wade knee-deep and waist-deep, the bright corollas in myri- 
ads touching petal to petal. Altogether this is the richest subalpine 
garden I have ever found, a perfect floral elysium." 

VI 

THE CRATER LAKE NATIONAL PARK 

Special Characteristic: Lake of Great Depth. Filling Collapsed Volcanic 

Crater 

IN the heart of the Cascade Mountains of our Northwest, whose 
volcanoes were in constant eruption in the ages before history, 
and now, extinct and ice-plated, shine like huge diamonds in the 
125862°— 20 3 



34 



OUR NATIONAL PARKS. 



sunlight, there lies, jewel-like in a setting of lava, a lake of unbe- 
lievable blue. The visitor who comes suddenly upon it stands silent 
with emotion, overcome by its quite extraordinary beauty and by a 
strange sense of mystery which even the unimaginative feel keenh' 
and which increases rather than decreases with familiarity. 

This is Crater Lake. 

One of the very largest of these ancient volcanoes was Mount 
Mazama. It stood in the southern central part of what is now 
Oregon, two hundred miles south of Mount Kainier and nearly as 
lofty. It was about the height of Mount Shasta, in plain sight of 
which it rose nearly a hundred miles to its north. 




^ Photograph by Fred H. Kiser 

Across Crater Lake, from near Victor Rock 

Showing the Watchman, Glacier Peak, Wizard Island, Llao Rock and Mount 

Thielsen in the distance 

But this was ages ago. No human eyes ever saw Mount Mazama. 
Long before man came, the entire upper part of it in some titanic 
cataclysm fell in upon itself as if swallowed by a subterranean cav- 
ern, leaving its craterlike lava sides cut sharply downward into the 
central abyss. 

What a spectacle that must have been ! 

The first awful depth of this vast hole no man can guess. But the 
volcano was not quenched; it burst up through the collapsed lavas 
in three places, making lesser cones within the greater, but none 
quite so high as the surrounding rim. 

Then the fires ceased and gradually, as the years passed, springs 
percolated into the vast basin and filled it with water within a thou- 
sand feet of its rim. As you see it to-day one of these cones emerges 
a few hundred feet from the surface. The lake is 2,000 feet deep in 
places. It has no inlet of any sort nor is there any stream running 
out of it ; but the water is supposed to escape by underground chan- 
nels and to reappear in the Klamath River, a few miles away. 



OUR NATIONAL, PARKS, 35 

'Geologists find Crater Lake of special interest because of the way 
nature made it. Many volcanoes have had their tops blown off. 
Mount Rainier was one of these. But no other in the United States 
has fallen into itself, like Mount Mazama. 

The evidence of this process is quite conclusive. The lava found 
on the slopes that remain was not blown there from an exploding 
summit but ran, hot and fluid, from a crater many thousands of feet 
higher. The pitch of these outer slopes enables the scientist to tell 
with reasonable probability how high the volcano originally was. 

ROMANTIC INDIAN LEGENDS 

The Indians believed that Crater Lake was the home of a great 
spirit whom they called Llao, The blue waters teemed with giant 
crawfish, his servants, some of them so large that they could reach- 
great claws to the top of the cliffs and seize venturesome visitors. 
Another great spirit chieftain, whom they called Skell, w^as supposed 
to live in the Klamath Marsh near by and to have many servants 
who could take at will the forms of eagles and antelopes. 

War broke out, so the Indian legend says, between Llao and Skell 
and Skell was captured. The monster from the lake tore out his 
heart and played ball with it, tossing it back and forth from moun- 
tain top to mountain top. But it was caught in the air by one of 
Skell's eagles and by him passed to one of Skell's antelopes, and by 
him passed to others who finally escape with it. 

Skell's body miraculously grew again around his heart and, in 
time, he captured Llao and tore his body into fragments, which he 
tossed into the lake. The giant crawfish, thinking them fragments 
of Skell's body, devoured them greedily. But when, last of all, Llao's 
head was thrown in, the monsters recognized it and would not eat it. 

The remains of Llao's head remain to-day sticking out of the water 
of Crater Lake. Some Indians still look upon it with awe, but 
scientists recognize it as the little cone described above. Its name is 
Wizard Island. 

But finally Llao had his revenge. His monsters seized the brave 
who first ventured, bore him to the highest part of the rim, and tore 
his body into small pieces. The spot where this was done is to-day 
called Llao Rock. 

PHANTOM SHIP AND WIZARD ISLAND 

Crater Lake is one of the most beautiful spots in America. The 
gray lava rim is remarkably sculptured. The water is remarkably 
blue, a lovely turquoise along the edges, and, in the deep parts, seen 
from above, extremely dark. The contrast on a sunny day between 



36 OUR NATIOISTAL, PARKS. 

the unreal, fairylike rim across the lake and the fantastic sculptures 
at one's feet, and, in the lake between, the myriad gradations from 
faintest turquoise to deepest Prussian blue, dwells long in the memory. 

Unforgettable, also, are the twisted and contorted lava formations 
of the inner rim. A boat ride along the edge of the lake reveals 
these in a thousand changes. At one point near shore a mass of 
curiously carved lava is called the Phantom Ship, because, seen 
at a distance, it suggests a ship under full sail. The illusion at dusk 
or by moonlight is striking. In certain slants of light the Phantom 
Ship suddenly disappears — a phantom, indeed. 

Another experience full of interest is a visit to Wizard Island. 
One can climb its sides and descend into its little crater. 

VII 
THE MESA VERDE NATIONAL PARK 

Special Characteristic : Prehistoric ClifE Dwellings 

WHERE did the Indians come from? That is one of the innu- 
merable questions which anthropologists have not yet solved. 
Some suggest that they came from Asia by way of Alaska, because 
the Eskimo seem to somewhat resemble Mongolians. Others think 
they came from Europe by way of Greenland; others that they 
came from the South Sea islands by way of South America. 

Perhaps all these theorists are right. In one thing only do they 
agree, and that is that from the Arctic to the Antarctic, no matter 
what their tribal or other differences due to varying conditions of 
climate and surroundings, all American Indians are of one physical 
type with similar mental characteristics and cultural tendencies. 

The highest civilization undoubtedly developed in Peru, Central 
America, and southern Mexico, where architectural ruins of quite 
astonishing beauty are to-day crumbling under the jungle. This 
civilization was ruthlessly destroyed by the Spanish conquest follow- 
ing the discovery of America. 

The next highest prehistoric civilization was in our own Southwest, 
and the remains of its highest special development are the cliff 
dwellings of the Mesa Verde in southwestern Colorado, to preserve 
which Congress has set apart the Mesa Verde National Park. 

When one speaks of the Pueblo Indians he does not mean an Indian 
stock or tribe, but merely Indians, possibly of various stocks and 
many tribes, who used to live, and a few of whose modern descendants 
still live, in pueblos or community houses of many rooms holding 
entire tribes or villages under one roof. The builders of Mesa Verde's 
prehistoric dwellings were of the Pueblo type. 



OUR NATIONAL PARKS. 



37 




►Spkuce Tkkk Hoi^sE, Mksa Veude National Park 
Showing how the dwellings are protected under overhanging clitts 

BURROWING INTO THE MESAS 

Those wlio have traveled through our Southwestern States have 
seen from the car window innumerable mesas or small isolated pla- 
teaus rising abruptly for hundreds of feet from the bare and often 
arid plains. The w^ord mesa is Spanish for table, and indeed many 
of these mesas wdien seen at a distance may suggest to the imaginative 
]nind tables with cloths reaching to the floor. 

Once the level of these mesa tops was the level of all of this vast 
southwestern country, but the rains and floods of centuries have 
^^ashed away all the softer earth down to its present level, leaving 
standing only the rocky spots or those so covered with surface rocks 
that the rains could not reach the softer gravel underneath. 

All have heard of the Enchanted Mesa in New Mexico which the 
Indians of recent times considered sacred. The Mesa Verde, or green 
mesa (because it is covered with stunted cedar and pinyon trees in a 
land, where trees are few) is the next most widely Iniown. 

The Mesa Verde is one of the largest mesas. It is 15 miles long 
and 8 miles wide. At its foot are masses of broken rocks rising from 
300 to 500 feet above the bare plains. These are called the talus. 
Above the talus yellow sandstone walls rise precipitously two or three 
hundred feet higher to the mesa's top. 

It stands, on the right bank of the Mancos Eiver, down to which 
a number of small, rough canyons, once beds of streams, slope from 
the top of the mesa. It is in the sides of these small canyons where 



38 OUR NATIONAL PARKS. 

the most wonderful and best preserved cliff dwellings in America, if 
not in the world, are found to-day. 

LIVING HARD IN PREHISTORIC TIMES 

In prehistoric times a large human population lived in these cliff 
dwellings, seeking a home there for protection. They obtained their 
livelihood by agriculture on the forbidding tops of the mesa, culti- 
vating scanty farms which yielded them small crops of corn. 

Life must have been hard in this dry country, when the Mesa 
Verde communities flourished in the side of these sandstone cliffs. 
Game was scarce and hunting arduous. The Mancos yielded a few 
fishes. The earth contributed berries or nuts. At that time, as at 
present, water was rare and found only in sequestered places near 
the heads of the canyons, but notwithstanding these difficulties the 
inhabitants cultivated their farms and raised their corn, which they 
ground on flat stones called metates, and baked their bread on a flat 
*;tone griddle. They boiled their meat in well-made vessels, some of 
which were artistically decorated. 

Their life was hard, but so confidently did they believe that they 
were dependent upon the gods to make the rain fall and the corn 
grow that they were a religious people who worshipped the sun as 
the father of all, and the earth as the mother who brought them all 
their material blessings. They possessed no written language, and 
could only record their thoughts by a few symbols which they painted 
on their earthenware jars or scratched on the sides of the cliffs adjoin- 
ing their habitations. 

iVs their sense of beauty was keen, their art, though primitive, was 
true ; rarely realistic, generally symbolic. Their decoration of cotton 
fabrics and ceramic work might be called beautiful, even when judged 
by the highly developed taste of to-day. They fashioned axes, spear- 
points, and rude tools of stone ; they wove brightly-patterned sandals 
and made attractive basketry. 

They were not content w4th rude buildings, and had long outgrown 
caves or earth homes that satisfied less civilized Indians farther north 
and south of them. They shaped stones into regular forms, orna- 
mented them with designs and laid them one on another. Their 
masonry resisted destructive forces of centuries of rain and snow 
beating upon them. 

The Mesa Verde tribes probably had little culture when they first 
climbed these precipitous rocks and found shelter, like animals, in 
the natural caves under the overhanging floor of the mesa. These 
caves were shelters not only from the storm of winter and the burn- 
ing sun of summer, but from rapacious human enemies as well ; for 



OUR NATIONAL PARKS. 39 

there are evidences of determined Avarfare among the prehistoric 
tribes of our southwest lands. 

But with the generations, perhaps the centuries, they made rapid 
strides. Ladders were substituted for zigzag trails, making their 
retreats more inaccessible, adobe supplemented caves, brick and stone 
succeeded adobe, culture succeeded savagery. 

DISCOVERY OF THE SUN TEMPLE 

A great mound on the top of the mesa which Dr. Fewkes unearthed 
in the summer of 1915 shows that, probably about 1300 A. D., they 
had begun to emerge from the caves to build upon the surface, still a 
further advance in civilization. It is significant that this building is 
partially sculptured and architecturally ambitious. It is still more 
significant that it was not a house for temporal needs nor a fortress, 
but a religious structure. It was a temple to their god, the sun. 

The following year Dr. Fewkes unearthed another great building 
on the surface in what is known as the Mummy Lake region of the 
park. This was a pueblo, or community living house, and appar- 
ently belongs to the period of Sun Temple. This is called Farview 
House, because of its commanding situation. There are other similar 
mounds. 

The remains of this advanced civilization, of quality so greatly 
beyond its neighbors, may be seen and studied by all who choose to 
visit the Mesa Verde National Park. It is an experience full of 
interest and pleasure. There are many canyons, and many ruins in 
each canyon. There are ruins yet unexplored. There are several 
mounds, like that under which Sun Temple was discovered, yet un- 
earthed. The visitor may enter these ruins and examine many of 
the articles which vv'ere found in them. 

EXPLORATION OF THE MESA VERDE 

Two herdsmen, Richard and Alfred Wetherill, while hunting lost 
cattle one December day in 1888, discovered these ruins. Coming 
to the edge of a small canyon, they saw under the overreaching cliffs 
of the opposite side, apparently hanging above a great precipice, 
what they thought was a city with towers and walls. They were 
astonished beyond measure — and indeed even the expectant visitor of 
to-day involuntarily exclaims over the beauty of the spectacle. 

Later they explored it and called it Cliff Palace — an unfortunate 
name, for it was not a palace at all, but a village with 200 rooms for 
family living with 22 kivas, or sacred rooms, for worship. Later 
on they found another similar community dwelling, which once 
sheltered 350 inhabitants. This they called Spruce Tree House, be- 
cause a large spruce tree grew near it. These names have remained. 



40 OUK NATIONAL PARKS. 

Other explorers followed and many other ruins were found. This 
is not the place to name or describe them, but it may be said that 
here may be seen the oldest and most fully realized civic-center 
scheme in America. City planning, of which we hear so much now, 
as if it were a new idea, began in America five or six centuries ago 
under the cliffs of the Mesa Verde. 

Antiquities are not the only attractions in the Mesa Verde National 
Park. Its natural beauties should not be overlooked. In winter it 
is wholly inaccessible on account of the deep snows; in some months 
it is dry and parched, but in June and July, when rains come, vege- 
tation is in full bloom, the plants flower, and the grass grows high in 
the glades; the trees put forth their new green leaves. The Mesa 
Verde is attractive in all seasons of the year and full of interest for 
those who love the unusual and picturesque of mountain scenery. 

VIII. 

THE GLACIER NATIONAL PARK 

Special Characteristics: Unsurpassed Romantic Scenery; 250 Lakes of 

Particular Beauty 

THE Glacier National Park is so named because in the hollow of 
its rugged mountain tops lie more than 60 small glaciers, the re- 
mainders of ancient monsters which once covered all but the highest 
mountain peaks. It is in northwestern Montana right up against the 
Canadian boundary line, from which, on the map. it appears to 
hang down like a boy's pocket full of the sort of things boys usually 
carry there. It is a richly colored land of gigantic cirques, ruggedly 
modeled mountains, enormous twisting glacier-scooped valleys, 
precipices thousands of feet high, innumerable rushing streams, and 
hundreds of lakes of unusual romantic beauty. Though all the other 
national parks have these general features in addition to others 
which differentiate each from the other, the Glacier National Park 
possesses them in unusual abundance and especially happy combina- 
tion. In fact, the almost sensational massing of these scenic features 
is one of the elements of its marked individuality. 

Its geological history is identical with that of the Canadian 
Rockies, but the region lies in a much older rock formation. There is 
no other scenic area in the world to compare it with except the far 
less colorful, much snowier, and much less accessible Canadian 
Rockies. In richness of beauty it stands alone. 

A ROMANCE OF GEOLOGY 

How Nature made this remarkable area far back in the dim ages 
long before man is a stirring story. 



OUR NATIONAL, PARKS. 



41 



In an age of the earth's making which some geologists estimate at 
80,000,000 years ago, before the continent of North America had 
emerged in its present outlines from the sea, the shales which now 
loom so loftily in Glacier National Park were deposited as sediments 
in the waters. Over these muds thick beds of ooze solidified into 
limestones, and over the limestones more sediments deposited and 
turned to shales. It is these very strata, now hardened into rocks, 
that streak so picturesquely the sides of Glacier precipices thousands 
of feet above us. The story of their elevation from deep-sea bottoms 
to these giddy heights is a romantic chapter in the making of 
America. 

The earth has assumed its present proportions through the set- 
tling of its masses, and this settling caused great internal pressures. 

Often the earth's skin has broken as the skin of the squeezed 
orange breaks ; and that is what must have happened where Glacier 
National Park now lies. The bottom of the sea, under the enormous 
pressure against its sides and from below, gradually rose and became 
dry land. 




photograph by H. T. Cowling 

Charactekistic Pointed Mountain in Glacier National Paek 
Mount Rockwell, overlooking Tv/o Medicine Lake 



42 OUR NATIONAL PARKS. 

Then the land at this point, probably because it was pushed hard 
by the contracting land masses on both sides of it, rose in long irreg- 
ular wavelike masses, forming mountains. Then, when the rock 
could no longer stand the awful strain, it cracked, and one edge was 
thrust upward and over the other edge and settled into its present 
position. 

The edge that was thrust over the other was thousands of feet 
thick. It crumbled into peaks, precipices, and gorges. 

Upon these mountains and precipices the snows and the rains of 
uncounted centuries have since fallen, and the ice and the waters 
have worn and carved them into the area of distinguished beauty that 
is to-day the Glacier National Park. 

But mark this : When the western edge of the earth's cracked skin 
overthrust the eastern edge, it brought its bottom surface over and 
on top of the eastern edge; and this bottom surface was the oldest 
sedimentary rock known, the very same strata of mud and limestone 
ooze which were deposited in the sea 80,000,000 years ago. And mark 
this, also, that the erosion of the years follow^ing has washed away 
all the deposits of the later geological ages that lay on the top of these 
strata, so that this ancient rock here lies fully exposed in all the 
glory of its greens and reds and grays, and all the fantastic carv- 
ings of the countless years. Of course the pressures which made the 
earth's skin rise and buckle and break made the Rocky Mountains, 
which at this point carry the Continental Divide. It is the same 
process which has made most of the mountain systems throughout 
the world, though there are few overthrusts so great as Glacier's. 

The fantastic carving of Glacier National Park was principally) 
the work of glaciers in the soft rock. Three times did great ice 
sheets, wooed south by falling temperatures, descend upon this region 
to dig the mighty cirques and scoop the immense valleys, and, be- 
tween these visitations and since the last, frost and rain have chipped 
and w^ashed and polished. Eating backward into the rocks from 
both sides, the glaciers nearly met a thousand times, leaving a land 
of enormous hollows separated by gigantic walls twisting and wind- 
ing in all directions. 

By these processes during uncountable years nature has created 
and decorated this marvelously beautiful region for our enjoyment 
to-day. 

SCENES OF EXQUISITE BEAUTY 

To picture to yourselves this region, imagine a chain of very lofty 
mountains twisting about like a worm, spotted everywhere with 
enow fields and bearing glistening glaciers in sixty or more hollows. 
Imagine these mountains crumbled and broken on their east sides 
into precipices sometimes three or four thousand feet deep and 



OUR NATIONAL PARKS. 



43 




(Jl.ACTKl! 



Iai.k- 



flanked everywhere by castellated walls, lesser peaks, and tumbled 
mountain masses of smaller size in whose hollows lie the most beauti- 
ful lakes you have ever dreamed of. 

Down from the Continental Divide descend 19 principal valleys, 
7 on the east side and 12 on the west. Of course there are very many 
smaller valleys tributary to each of these larger valleys. Tlirough 
these valleys run the rivers from the glaciers far up on the mountains. 



PURCHASED FROM THE INDIANS 

JNIany of these valleys are not yet thoroughly known. It is possible 
that some of them have never been even entered unless by Indians. 
The great Blackfeet Indian Eeservation, one of the many tracts of 
land set apart for the Indians still remaining in this country, ad- 
joins the Glacier National Park on the east. Northward the park 
adjoins the Waterton Lakes Park in Canada. 

There are 250 known lakes. There inay be small ones in the wilder 
parts which white men have not yet even seen. 

This region was not visited by white men till 1853, when a Govern- 
ment engineer, exploring for a route to the Pacific Ocean, ascended 
one of the creeks by mistake and returned when he found that no 
railroad could be built there. The next explorers were engineers 
who went in to establish the Canadian boundary line in 1861. 



44 OUK NATIONAL. PARKS. 

In 1890 copper was found and there was a rush of prospectors. In 
1896 Congress bought the land east of the Continental Divide from 
the Blackfeet Indians, but there was not enough copper to pay for 
the mining. Since then few persons went there but big game 
hunters till 1910, when it was made a national park. 

There are now several excellent hotels and several camps on the 
east side. The west side is wonderfully beautiful, too, and a hotel 
and camps are found there also. 

There are a few good roads for automobiles and many miles of 
trail for walking and horseback riding. A railroad touches its 
southern boundary. 

IX 
THE ROCKY MOUNTAIN NATIONAL PARK 

Special Characteristic : Readable Records of Glacial Period 

THE Rocky Mountain National Park is in Colorado, about 70 miles 
by road or rail northwest of Denver. Find Longs Peak on 
a good map and you will have the center of the 400 square miles of 
snow-topped mountains which constitute the park. 

These mountains are part of the Continental Divide, which is the 
name given to the irregular line of highest land running north and 
south through North America which divides the waters flowing east- 
ward into the Atlantic Ocean from those flowing westward into the 
Pacific. For this reason the people of Colorado call their mountains 
the top of the world. They are scarcely that, for the Himalaya 
Mountains in Asia and the Andes in South America are, among 
others, much higher ; but for the United States this picturesque fig- 
ure of speech is sufficiently near the truth. 

This national park is certainly very high up in the air. The sum- 
mer visitors who live at the base of the great mountains, principally 
at the beautiful eastern gateway, a little valley town of many hotels, 
which is called Estes Park, are 8,000 feet, or more than a mile and 
a half, above the level of the sea; while the mountains rise j^recipi- 
tously nearly a mile, and sometimes more than a mile, higher still. 
Longs Peak, the biggest of them all, rises 14,255 feet above sea level, 
and most of the other mountains in the snowy range, as it is some- 
times called, are more than 12,000 feet high; several are nearly as 
high as Longs Peak. 

AT TIMBERLINE. 

The valleys on both sides of this range and those which penetrate 
into its recesses are dotted with lovely parklike glades clothed in a 
profusion of glowing wild flowers and watered with cold streams 
from the mountain snows and glaciers. Forests of pine and silver- 



OUR NATIONAL PARKS. 



45 




Photograph by Enos Mills 

Looking into the Rocky Mountain National Park from Estes Park 

The long irregular hills in front of the mountains are one of the great glacial 

moraines so characteristic of this National Park 

stemmed aspen separate them. Timberline is more than 11,000 feet 
above sea level, and up to that point the slopes are covered thick and 
close vrith spruce and fir, growing very straight and very tall. 

Just at timberline, where the winter temperature and the fierce 
icy winds make it impossible for trees to grow tall, the spruces lie 
flat on the ground like vines, and presently give place to low birches 
which in their turn give place to small piney growths and finally to 
tough straggling grass, hardy mosses, and tiny Alpine flowers. 
Grass grows in sheltered spots even on the highest peaks, which is 
fortunate for the large curve-horned mountain sheep which seek 
these high open places to escape their special enemies, the mountain 
lions. 

Even at the highest altitudes gorgeously colored wild flowers grow 
in glory and profusion in sheltered gorges. Even in late September 
large and beautiful columbines are found in the lee of protecting 
masses of snow banks and glaciers. 

Above timberline the bare mountain masses rise from 1,000 to 
3,000 feet, often in sheer precipices. Covered with snow in fall, win- 
ter, and spring, and plentifully spattered with snow all summer long, 
the vast, bare granite masses, from which, in fact, the Rocky Moun- 
tains got their name, are beautiful beyond description. They are 
rosy at sunrise and sunset. During fair and sunny days they show 



46 OUR ]SrATIONAL PARKS. 

all shades of translucent grays and mauves and blues. In some lights 
they are almost fairylike in their exquisite delicacy. But on stormy 
days they are cold and dark and forbidding, burying their heads in 
gloomy clouds, from which sometimes they emerge covered with 
snow. 

Often one can see a thunderstorm born on the square granite head 
of Longs Peak. First, out of the blue sky a slight mist seems to 
gather. In a few moments, while you watch, it becomes a tiny cloud. 
This grows with great rapidity. In five minutes, perhaps, the moun- 
tain top is hidden. Then, out of nothing apparently, the cloud swells 
and sweeps over the sky. Sometimes in fifteen minutes after the first 
tiny fleck of mist appears it is raining in the valley and possibly 
snowing on the mountain. In half an hour more it has cleared. 

Standing on the summits of these mountains the climber is often 
enveloped in these brief-lived clouds. It is an impressive experience 
to look down upon the top of an ocean of cloud from which the 
greater peaks emerge at intervals. Sometimes the sun is shining on 
the observer upon the heights while it is raining in the valleys below. 
It is startling to see lightning below you. 

ACCESSIBILITY 

One of the striking features of the Rocky Mountain National Park 
is the easy accessibility of these mountain tops. One may mount a 
horse after early breakfast in the valley, ride up Flattop to enjoy one 
of the great views of the world, and be back for late luncheon. The 
hardy foot traveler may make better time than the horse on thes& 
mountain trails. One may cross the Continental Divide from the 
hotels of one side to the hotels of the other between early breakfast 
and late dinner. 

In fact, for all-around accessibility there surely is no high moun- 
tain resort of the first order that will quite compare with the Eocky 
Mountain National Park. Three railroads to Denver skirt its sides, 
and Denver is less than thirty hours from St. Louis and Chicago. 

ROCKY MOUNTAIN SHEEP 

This range was once a famous hunting ground for large game. 
Lord Dunraven, the English sportsman, visited it yearly to shoot its 
deer, bear, and bighorn sheep, and acquired large holdings by pur- 
chase of homesteading and squatters' claims, much of which was 
reduced in the contests that followed. Now that the Government has 
made it a national park, the protection offered its wild animals will 
make it in a few years one of the most successful wild-animal refuges 
in the world. 

These lofty rocks are the natural home of the celebrated Rocky 
Mountain sheep, or bighorn. This animal is much larger than any 



OUR NATIONAL PARKS. 



47 




domestic sheep. It is powerful and Avonderfully agile. When pur- 
sued these sheep, even the lambs, unhesitatingly drop head down- 
ward off precipitous 
cliffs apparently many 
hundreds of feet high. 
Of course, they strike 
friendly ledges every 
few feet to break the 
fall, but these ledges 
often are not wide 
enough to stand upon; 
they are mere rocky ex- 
crescences a foot or less 
in width, from which 
the sheep plunge to the 
next and the next, and 
so on till they reach 
good footing in the 
valley below. So swift 
is the descent that, seen 
from below at a dis- 
tance, these pauses are 
often scarcely apparent. 
The fact that the sheep 
always plunge head first has given rise to the fable that they land 
on their curved horns. This is absolutely untrue ; they always strike 
ledges with all four feet held close together. They also ascend slopes 
surprisingly steep. 

They are more agile even than the celebrated chamois of the Swiss 
Alps, and are larger, more powerful, and much handsomer. It is 
something not to be forgotten to see a dozen or twenty mountain 
sheep making way along the slopes of Specimen Mountain in the 
Rocky Mountain National Park. 

LONGS PEAK AND THE GLACIER RECORDS 

The prominent central feature of the Rocky Mountain National 
Park is Longs Peak. It rears a square-cornered boxlike head well 
above the tumbled sea of surrounding mountain tops. It has, unlike 
most great mountains, a distinct architectural form. Standing well 
to the east of the range at about its center, it suggests the captain 
of a white-helmeted company; the giant leader of a giant band. It 
is supported on four sides by mountain buttresses, suggesting the 
stone buttresses of a central cathedral spire. From every side it 
looks the same, yet remarkably different. One does not know Longs 



Photograph by G. Swansou 

Rocky Mountain Sheep, Bighorn. 



48 



OUR NATIONAL PARKS. 




Photograph by H. T. Cowling 

Top of Tyndall Glacier, Rocky Mountain National Park 
On the summit of Flattop Mountain, nearly 18.000 feet altitude 

Peak until he has seen it from every side, and then it becomes to him 
not a mountain mass but an architectural creation. 

For many years Longs Peak was considered unclimbable. But at 
last a way was found through an opening in perpendicular rocks 
called, from its shape, the Keyhole, out upon a steep slope leading 
from near its summit far down to a precipice upon its west side. 
The east side of Longs Peak is a nearly sheer precipice almost 2,000 
feet from the extreme top down to Chasm Lake, which was the start- 
ing point of a gigantic glacier in times long before man. Chasm 
Lake, which is not difficult to reach from the valley, is one of the 
wildest lakes in nature. It is frozen 11 months of the year. 

There is no other region in America where glacial records of such 
prominence are more numerous and more easily reached and studied 
than in the Rocky Mountain National Park. The whole country has 
been fantastically cut and carved by gigantic glaciers of the prehis- 
toric past. Their ancient beds, now grown with forests, their huge 
moraines, their cirques, or starting places, are, next to the vast 
mountains themselves, the most prominent features of the region. 



OUR NATIONAL PARKS. 49 

A few miles directly west of Denver and 60 miles south of Longs 
Peak another outcropping of the Front Range offers a spectacle of 
similar wildness and beauty. 

MOUNT EVANS 

Mount Evans, its central feature, is several feet higher than 
Longs Peak, but so accessible that it w^ill be possible to reach its 
summit by automobile upon completion of a proposed road. It 
suggests a mighty sprawling castle supported on four sides by 
gigantic buttresses of granite mountains. The region, which is one 
of wild grandeur and supreme beauty, is approached through Den- 
ver's remarkable series of mountain parks. 

X 

THE HAWAII NATIONAL PARK 

Characteristics: Large volcanoes, one active, and the Kilauea Lake of Fire 

THE Hawaiian Islands are a land of coral reefs, tropical palms 
and flowers, pineapples and sugar cane, midday siestas, rain- 
bows, music, earthquakes and volcanic violence. They have a 
history which is a romance. Their very mention evokes visions of 
girls dancing under tropical stars to the ukelele. They possess the 
fourth largest volcanic crater in the world, the largest active vol- 
cano in the world, and a lake of turbulent sulphurous fire, which 
fills the beholder with awe. 

It was not the gentle poetic aspects of the Hawaiian Islands which 
led Congress to create a national park there, though these form its 
romantic, contrasted setting. It was the extraordinary volcanic 
exhibit, that combination of thrilling spectacles of Nature's colossal 
power, which for years has drawn travelers from the four quarters 
of the earth. The Hawaii National Park includes the summits of 
three volcanoes of world celebrity — Haleakala, on the island of 
Maui, and Mauna Loa and Kilauea, on the island of Hawaii. 

There are 12 islands in all, 8 of which are hosj^itable enough for 
habitation. They rose from the ocean's bottom in a series of sub- 
marine eruptions. Coral growths have enlarged and enriched them 
since. Kauii was the first island to develop habitable conditions, and 
those to its southeast followed in order. Hawaii, the youngest, is 
still in the building. Dead Haleakala on the Island of Maui has been 
inactive for centuries. 

HALEAKALA 

The popular translation of the name Haleakala is " The House of 
the Sun " ; literally the word means " The house built by the sun.'' 
12.fi862°— 20 1 



50 OUR NATIONAL PARKS. 

The volcano is a monster of more than 10,000 feet, which bears upon 
its summit a crater of a size and beauty that makes it one of the 
world's show places. This crater is T^ miles long by 2 j miles wide. 
Its surrounding walls rise 2,000 feet. Its broad, rolling, rainless, 
sandy floor is decorated with plants famous under the name of silver 
swords; yucca-like shrubs 3 or 4 feet high, whose drooping fila- 
ments of bloom gleam like polished stilettos. From this great gray 
floor within its lava rim rise, to a height of several hundred feet, 13 
volcanic cones. " It must have been awe inspiring," writes Castle, 
"when its cones were spouting fire, and rivers of scarlet molten 
lava crawled along the floor." That the crater was left in all its 
beauty is due to the fact that enormous side vents drained the fires 
from below. 

Sunrise and sunset are the magic hours when the immense bowl 
and its cratered cones catch a hundred fleeting tints to mingle with 
their silver. Midnight and moonlight parties climb the mountain 
to see the sunrise glories, or make the trip in the afternoon in order 
to have the additional enjoyment of the wonder of the sunset. 
Visitors return loquacious with the myriad charms of the islands, 
but silent about Haleakala's morning and evening splendor; it 
baffles speech. Sometimes at the sunset hour is seen the broken 
specter. The lowering sun throws upon the rising mists the shadow 
of the watcher upon the rim and encircles it with a rainbow frame. 

MAUNA LOA 

Upon the island of Hawaii, across 60 miles of water from Maui, 
another section of the national park incloses Mauna Loa, greatest 
of living volcanoes, and Kilauea's celebrated lake of fire. These are 
different volcanoes, but so huge has grown Mauna Loa, the greater 
and the ^^ounger, that Kilauea has been nearly absorbed in his spread- 
ing flank. 

Mauna Loa soars 13,675 feet. Its snowy dome shares with Mauna 
Kea, which rises even higher, the summit honors of the islands. 
From Hilo, the principal port of the island of Hawaii, Mauna Loa 
suggests the back of a leviathan, its body hidden in the mists. The 
way up, through forests of ancient mahogany and tangles of giant 
tree fern, then up many miles of lava slopes, is one of the inspii'ing 
tours in the mountain world. The summit crater, Mokuaweoweo, 
three-quarters of a mile long by a quarter-mile wide, is as spectacu- 
lar in action as that of Kilauea. 

This enormous volcanic mass has grown of its own output in 
comparatively a short time. For many decades it has been extraor- 
dinarily frequent in eruption. Every five or ten years it gets into 
action with violence, sometimes at the summit, oftener of recent 



OUR NATIONAL PARKS. 



51 




Photograph by Hawaiian Volcano Observatory 

HA7.EMAUMAU, " ThE HoUSE OF EVERLASTING FiRE " 

years since the central vent has lengthened, at weakened places on 
its sides. Few volcanoes have been so regularly and systematically 
studied. 

KILATJEA 

The most spectacular exhibit of the Hawaii National Park is the 
lake of fire in the crater of Kilauea. 

Kilauea is unusual among volcanoes. It follows few of the popu- 
lar conceptions. Older than the towering Mauna Loa, its height 
is only 4,000 feet. Its lavas have found vents through its flanks, which 
they have broadened and flattened; doubtless its own lavas have 
helped Mauna Loa's to merge the two mountains into one. It is no 
longer explosive like the usual volcano ; since 1790, when it destroyed 
a native army, it has ejected neither rocks nor ashes. Its crater is 
not bowl-shaped. From the middle of a broad flat plain, which 
really is what is left of the ancient great crater, drops a pit with 
vertical sides within which boil its lavas. This pit, the lake of fire, 
is Halemaumau, commonly translated " The House of Everlasting 
Fire." 

Two miles and a little more from Halemaumau, on a part of the 
ancient crater wall, stands the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory, 
Avhich is under the control of the Massachusetts Institute of Tech- 
nology. One may approach the fiery pit through forests of mahog- 
any, sandal wood, and giant tree fern ; then across long stretches of 
hard lava congealed in ropes and ripples and strange contortions. 



52 OUR NATIONAL PARKS. 

Then the pit. The traveler reaches it suddenly. From its rim he 
looks perpendicularly down hundreds of feet into a cavity 1,000 by 
1,200 feet in area. The spectacle is weird beyond description. 

" The lake of fire," writes William R. Castle, " is a greenish yellow, 
cut with ragged cracks of red that look like pale streaks of station- 
ary lightning across its surface. It is restless, breathing rapidly, 
bubbling up at one point and sinking down in another; throwing up 
sudden fountains of scarlet molten lava that play a few minutes and 
subside, leaving shimmering mounds which gradually settle to the 
level surface of the lake, turning brown and yellow as they sink." 

It is an appalling spectacle at night. 

One can descend the sides and approach surprisingly close to the 
flaming surface, the temperature of which, by the way, is 1,750° F. 

Such is "The House of Everlasting Fire" to-day. But who can 
say what it will be a year or a decade hence ? A clogging or a shift- 
ing of the vents 10,000 feet below sea level, and Kilauea's lake of fire 
may become again explosive. Wlio will deny that Kilauea may yet 
soar even above Mauna Loa ? Stranger things have happened before 
this in the Islands of Surprise. 

XI 

THE LASSEN VOLCANIC NATIONAL PABK 

Special Characteristic: Volcano in semi-action 

NE of the greatest fields of former volcanic activity in the world 







lies in the northwestern corner of the United States; its lavas 
cover a quarter of a million square miles and include large areas 
of the States of Washington and Oregon and portions of California, 
Nevada, Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming. Most of this great region 
now, of course, blooms with forest and prairie. The origin of its 
soil foundations is apparent only to the eye of the geologist except 
where the ice-clad cones of monster volcanoes rise from the Cascade 
Range, where Lassen Peak still vomits smoke and steam, and where 
remnants of twisted lavas emerge, as on Mount Washburn, above the 
forests of Yellowstone. 

To-day Lassen Peak only is aggressive, and for this reason Con- 
gress has set it apart as a national park. Here alone within the 
borders of the United States may be seen and studied the phenomena 
of volcanic activity. 

Lassen Peak is in northern California at the southern end of the 
Cascade Range. It had been quiet for 200 years. Then, at the end 
of May, 1914, as if precursor of the cataclysm of war so soon to 
follow, an explosion from its summit ushered in a new period of 
eruption which, feeble as compared with those of its violent past, 
was magnificent as a spectacle and educationally typical oi vol- 
canism. 



OUR NATIONAL, PARKS. 



53 








Lassen Volcano in Eruption 

Eruption of October 6, 1915, seen from Manzanita Lake, at a distance of 5 miles. A 
column of " smoke," composed of steam, black with volcanic dust, rose from the 
crater and at a height of about 3,000 feet above the crater spread to the mushroom 
form shown above about 30 minutes after the eruption began. Photo © by C. 
Mullen, who took throe views of the eruption, at 10-minute intervalf!, to show its 
progress. The " lid " of new lava, formed about May 22, Alls the old crater at the 
time this view was taken, but can not be clearly seen on account of new snow and 
cloud shadows. 



54 OUR NATIONAL PARKS. 

From the first explosion to the end of January, 1916, Lassen re- 
mained in more or less constant eruption. Within that period oc- 
curred 220 explosions, between which the volcano emitted day and 
night enormous quantities of smoke and steam. 

The greatest of the explosions occurred May 22, 1915, nearly a 
year after the eruptions began. It was ushered in by the rising of a 
mushroom-shaped cloud of smoke to a height of 4 miles. Another 
interesting phenomenon of this explosion was the superheated gas 
blast which rushed down Lost Creek and Hot Creek Valleys during 
its continuance. For 10 miles it withered or destroyed every living 
thing in its path. Large treps were uprooted. Forests were scorched 
to a cinder, spreading fires. Large snow fields were instantly turned 
to water and fl,ooded the lower valleys in rushing tides. Fortunately 
summer visitors had been well warned. 

Examination showed that this explosion had opened a new fissure 
extending 1,000 feet from the summit down the slope toward Chaos 
Crags, the old and the new craters, now joined in one of irregular 
shape, filled to the brim with lava, forming what geologists call a 
lid. After this great explosion activity declined rapidly. 

The national park has great natural charm as well as scientific in- 
terest. The lava forms, ancient as well as modern, are fantastic and 
striking. Its fumaroles, its very hot springs, its lofty ragged peak 
and twisted crater, its extremely interesting Cinder Cone, its minor 
vents, all have also a strange, almost uncanny, beauty. And these 
volcanic exhibits are set in an area of forests and ice-cold lakes and 
rushing trout streams, which add the enchantment of vivid con- 
trast. 

XII 

THE MOUNT McKINLEY NATIONAL PARK 

Characteristic: A snow-clad mountain more than 20,000 feet high rising 
from a rolling plateau, peopled with caribou and mountain sheep 

THE highest mountain in North America, scenically speaking the 
highest in the world, together with an enormous expanse of roll- 
ing plateau on its north and west, was made a national park in 1917. 
Mount McKinley rises from the great Alaska range 20,300 feet above 
sea level. Down its southern and eastern slopes through a region of 
arctic sublimity flow glaciers of enormous size, but north and west 
its sides abruptly drop to grassy valleys only 3,000 feet in altitude. 
From these valleys, some of which also have impressive glaciers, visi- 
tors to the national park may look up 17,000 feet of mountain, a 
spectacle greater by far than greets the eyes of those who climb into 
the lofty valleys of the Himalayas to see the several mountains there 
whose heights measured from sea level exceed McKinley's. 



OUR NATIONAL PARKS. 



55 








5 




fc_ 



Photograph by H. C. Parker 

Mount McKinley fkom the Southwest 

Congress created this national park principally to protect its wild 
animals. It was feared that, with the opening of the Government 
railroad to Fairbanks, then rajDidly building, sportsmen and market 
hunters would destroy the large herds of caribou on its vast plateau 
and the myriad mountain sheep upon its foothills. In this refuge, 
whicli the hunter has rarely penetrated, these animals will be safe 
from the fate which so rapidly is overtaking their kind elsewhere in 
Alaska. 

It was none too soon to protect them. Already market hunters 
from the neighboring Kantishna gold-mining district had begun to 
invade the plateau from the West, and there is little doubt that, as 
the railroad neared the park, enterprising hunters would have found 
profitable markets in the construction camps, and later in the towns 
which would spring up along the railroad. 

The caribou, with its enormous antlers, is a most picturesque ani- ' 
mal, the American representative of the reindeer family. Herds of 
a thousand and fifteen hundred roam the great plateau. ISIost of 
these, never having been hunted, are as unafraid as the elk and the 
deer of the Yellowstone. Charles Sheldon reports having counted as 
many as 500 mountain sheep upon the foothills which he passed in 
one ordinary day's journey through the valleys. Moose frequently 
invade the region from the Tenana lowlands on the north. And the 
great Alaska brown bear is not infrequently met, even within the belt 
of perpetual snow. 



56 OUR NATIONAL PARKS. 

It is this great treeless plateau, with its rich mosses and grasses, 
its sudden prominences rising like islands, its sweeping ranges of 
low hills, its lakes, its innumerable rushing streams, its fertile flow- 
ered valleys and friendly animals, its long winding approachable 
glaciers, and its background of the Alaska Hange and Master 
Mountain, that to the visitor will mean the Mount McKinley Na- 
tional Park. It is an area unlike any other national park ; its charm 
and inspiration are all its own. 

Mount McKinley is two-headed. It is the South Peak which is 
the summit. From the North and the South Peaks, supporting them 
like ice buttresses, descend northward long ridges which merge in 
the foothills, and betAveen these ridges flow from the divide between 
the peaks a series of great glaciers which constitute the only known 
passage to the summit. 

Various attempts have been made to climb McKinley, but only two 
have been successful. Judge Wickersham, of Alaska, was the pio- 
neer in 1903, but he so wholly underestimated the magnitude of the 
undertaking that his equipment served to carry him little farther 
than its base. Dr. Frederick A. Cook, of North Pole fame, made 
two attempts, one from the north side and one from the south. In 
1912 Prof. Parker and Belmore Brown made the ascent, and the 
following spring Archdeacon Stuck and Harry P. Karstens ascended 
the glaciers of the north side and reached the summit on that rarest 
of occasions with McKinley, a perfect day. 

One other ascent must be mentioned to complete the record, that of 
the North Peak in 1910 by a party of adventurous prospectors 
headed by Thomas Lloyd ; but Lloyd himself did not go all the way. 

It is probable that trying for the summit will not be one of the 
popular amusements of the McKinley National Park, but, when 
railroad, trails, and public camps make this wonderland comfortably 
accessible, many will find unique pleasure and inspiration in trips 
part way up the glaciers into the white land of the avalanche. 

XIII 
THE GRAND CANYON NATIONAL PARK 

Special Characteristics: A highly-colored gorge 1 mile deep and 10 or 12 

miles across 

THE rain falling in the plowed field forms rivulets in the furrows. 
The rivulets unite in a muddy torrent in the roadside gutter. 
With succeeding showers the gutter wears an ever-deepening chan- 
nel in the soft soil. With the jDassing season the gutter becomes a 
gully. Here and there, in places, its banks undermine and fall in. 
Here and there the rivulets from the field wear tiny tributary gullies. 
Between the breaks in the banks and the tributaries, irregular masses 



OUR NATIONAL PARKS. 



57 




Photograph by II. T. Cowling 

An Unparalleled Spectacle 
Storm in tlie Canyon seen from Hermit Road 

of earth remain standing, sometimes resembling mimic cliffs, some- 
times washed and worn into mimic peaks and spires. 

Such roadside erosion is familiar to us all. A hundred times we 
have idly noted the fantastic water-carved walls and minaretted 
slopes of these ditches. But seldom, perhaps, have we realized that 
the muddy roadside ditch and the world famous Grand Canyon of 
the Colorado are, from Nature's standpoint, identical; that they 
differ only in soil and size. 

The arid States of our great Southwest constitute an enormous 
plateau or table-land from four to eight thousand feet above sea 
level. It is plateau of sun-baked conglomerate and loose soils from 
which emerge occasional mountain masses of more or less solid rock. 
Eain seldom falls, but in winter the snows lie heavy in the moun- 
tains. In the spring the snows melt and torrents of water wear tem- 
porary beds in the loose soils. 

In ages before history the Colorado Kiver probably flowed upon 
the surface of this lofty table-land. But, like the roadside ditch, it 



68 OUR NATIONAL PARKS. 

gradually wore an ever- deepening channel. In time, as with the 
roadside ditch, the banks caved in and the current carried the soil 
away. The ever busy chisels of the untiring winds have carved and 
l^olished through untold centuries. 

AN TJNPARALLELED SPECTACLE 

To-day the Colorado flows through a series of self-dug canyons 
hundreds of miles long, a mile deep, and in some places a score of 
miles across the top. The sides of these canyons are carved and 
fretted beyond description, almost beyond belief; and the strata of 
rock and soil exposed by the river's excavations are marvelously 
colored. The blues and grays and mauves and reds are second in 
glory only to the canyon's size and sculpture. The colors change 
with every changing hour. The morning and the evening shadows 
play magician's tricks. 

That portion of the canyon which affords the finest spectacle was 
created a National Park in March, 1919. It is situated in north- 
eastern Arizona and is called the Grand Canyon National Park. It 
constitutes one of the most astonishing phenomena in nature and one 
of the stupendous sights of the world. 

The Colorado River is formed, in southern Utah, by the confluence 
of the Grand and the Green Rivers. The Grand drains the western 
Rockies in Colorado. The Green rises in northern Utah and drains 
also a corner of Wyoming. Together they gather the waters of 
300,000 square miles of mountains. "Ten million cascade brooks," 
writes J. W. Powell, " unite to form a hundred rivers beset with 
cataracts; a hundred roaring rivers unite to form the Colorado, a 
mad, turbid stream." 

Southwest from Utah, the Colorado passes into Arizona through 
the noble Marble Canyon and swings west between the mile-high 
walls of the mighty Grand Canyon. Thence, emerging into more 
open country, it skirts Nevada and California, cuts through Mexico, 
and deposits its vast burden of mud in the Gulf of California. 

MOSAIC OF DESCRIPTION 

Who can describe the Grand Canyon? 

" More mysterious in its depth than the Himalayas in their height," 
writes John C. Van Dyke, " the Grand Canyon remains not the eighth 
but the f.rst wonder of the world. There is nothing like it." 

"Looking down more than half a mile into this 15-by -218-mile 
paint pot," writes Joaquin Miller, " I continually ask : Is any 50 miles 
of Mother Earth that I have known as fearful, or any part as fearful, 
as full of glory, as full of God ? " 

" To the eye educated to any other," writes Charles Dudley Warner, 
"it may be shocking, grotesque, incomprehensible; but those who 



II 



OUR NATIONAL PAEKS. 



59 




Photograph by H. T. Cowling 

At the Foot of Hermit Trail, Grand Canyon National Park 

have long and carefully studied the Grand Canyon do not hesitate to 
pronounce it by far the most sublime of all earthly spectacles." 

" The Grand Canyon of Arizona fills me with awe," writes Theo- 
dore Eoosevelt. "It is beyond comparison — beyond description; 
absolutely unparalleled throughout the wide world." 

"A pageant of ghastly desolation and yet of frightful vitality, 
such as neither Dante nor Milton in their most sublime conceptions 



60 OUR NATIONAL PARKS. 

ever even aj^proached,*' writes William Winter. " Your heart is 
moved with feeling that is far too deep for words." 

"It has a thousand different moods," writes Handin Garland. 
" No one can know it for what it is who has not lived with it every 
day of the year. It is like a mountain range — a cloud to-day, a wall 
of marble to-morrow. When the light falls into it, harsh, direct, and 
searching, it is great, but not beautiful. The lines are chaotic, dis- 
turbing — but wait! The clouds and the sunset, the moonrise and 
the storm will transform it into a splendor no mountain range can 
surpass. Peaks will shift and glow, walls darken, crags take fire, 
and gray-green mesas, dimly seen, take on the gleam of opalescent 
lakes of mountain water." 

" It seems a gigantic statement for even nature to make all in 
one mighty stone word," writes John Muir. " AVildness so Godful, 
cosmic, primeval, bestows a new sense of earth's beauty and size. 
:;. * * But the colors^ the living, rejoicing coJorSy chanting, morn- 
ing and evening, in chorus to heaven ! Whose brush or pencil, how- 
ever lovingly inspired, can give us these? In the supreme flaming 
glory of sunset the whole canyon is transfigured, as if all the life and 
light of centuries of sunshine stored up in the rocks was now being 
poured forth as from one glorious fountain, flooding both earth and 
sky." 

DIFFICULT TO COMPREHEND 

Even the most superficial description of this enormous spectacle 
may not be put in words. The wanderer upon the rim overlooks a 
thousand square miles of pyramids and minarets carved from the 
painted depths. Many miles away and more than a mile below the 
level of his feet he sees a tiny silver thread which he knows is the 
giant Colorado. He is numbed by the spectacle. At first he can 
not comprehend it. There is no measure, nothing which the eye can 
grasp, the mind fathom. 

It may be hours before he can even slightly adjust himself to the 
titanic spectacle, before it ceases to be utter chaos, and not until then 
does he begin to exclaim in rapture. And he never wholly adjusts 
himself, for with dawning appreciation comes growing wonder. 
Comprehension lies always just beyond his reach. But it will help 
to descend one of these trails which zigzag down the precipitous 
cliffs to the river's muddy edge. 

The Grand Canyon was first reported to the civilized world by the 
early Spanish explorers in 1540. It was first described in 1851 by 
the Sitgreaves Expedition. The War Department explored the navi- 
gable waters from the south in 1858, but stopped at the foot of the 
canyons. 



OUR NATIONAL PARKS. 



61 



MAJOR POWELL'S FIRST EXPLORATION 



No exploration of the Grand Canyon was made until 1869, when 
Major J. W. Powell, who afterwards became Director of the United 
States Geological Survey, made a perilous passage with a party of 
nine men in four small boats. This exploration constitutes one of the 
most romantic adventures in American history. Until then it was 
unknown. 

" Yet enough had been seen to foment rumor," Major Powell wrote 
in his report to the Smithsonian Institution, " and many wonderful 
stories have been told in the hunter's cabin and prospector's camp. 
Stories were related of parties entering the gorge in boats and being 
carried down- with fearful velocity into whirlpools, where all were 
overwhelmed in the abyss of waters ; others, of underground passages 
for the great river, into which boats had passed never to be seen 
again. It was currently believed that the river was lost under the 
rocks for several hundred miles. There were other accounts of great 
falls whose roaring music could be heard on distant mountain 
summits." 

The passage, while it developed none of these reported dangers, 
was sufficiently perilous. Boats were repeatedly upset in the rapids, 
food was nearly exhausted, and the adventurers many times barely 
escaped destruction. Four men who deserted the party, terrified, 
attempted to climb the walls, but were never heard from again. 




Photograph by H. T. Cowling 

Memorial to Major John Wesley Powell Erected by the Department qf 

THE Interior 
It stands on the rim at Sentinel Point 



62 



OUR NATIONAL PARKS. 



XIV 
THE LAFAYETTE NATIONAL PARK 

Special Characteristics: A Group of Granite Mountains Rising from an 
Island on the Atlantic Coast 

THE first national park in the East is an area of 8 square miles on 
ISIoiint Desert Island, Me. It includes a group of low granite 
mountains abutting the sea, the only prominent elevation along the 
entire Atlantic coast of the United States. 

The Lafaj'ette National Park is not only a varied and beautiful 
exhibit of seacoast, mountain, and eastern forest — it is a monument 
to the public spirit of New England. These mountains, surrounded 
by thriving seashore resorts, had been in private ownership for cen- 
turies. The day was fast approaching when they would be utilized 
for summer homes. Foreseeing this, George B. Dorr, of Bar Harbor, 
Me., determined to acquire them as a gift to the people of the United 
States. He created a holding organization, to which he and Charles 
W. Eliot contributed their holdings, and set about to persuade other 
owners to do the same. 

It took a dozen years of ceaseless effort to collect 5,000 acres, much 
of it by gift, some of it by purchase from funds collected from public- 
spirited persons. Then they presented it to the Nation, and it was 
made the Sieur cle Monts National Monument. This was in 1915. 
Other contributions poured in, and when Congress made it the 
Lafayette National Park in 1919 its area had doubled. 




Copyright by Natioual Geographic Society 

Lafayett'c National Park 
Where Champlain Mountain, the easternmost and boldest in the park, comes 

down to meet the sea 



OUE XATIOXAL PAEKS. 63 

Compared with the huge bristling peaks of the Rockies and the 
Sierra, the mountains of the Lafayette National Park are low indeed. 
But they are no less beautiful, and they are characteristic of our 
East, as the Rocky Mountain and Sierran national parks are charac- 
teristic of our TTest. There are more than a dozen mountains in the 
group, which is cut into two parts by a fine fiord called Somes Sound. 
Fresh-water lakes lie in the hollows. Forests of coast pines, cedars, 
and deciduous trees of many kinds border the lakes and mount the 
gray sides of the mountains. Innumerable shrubs and flowering 
plants decorate the forest aisles. The region is a wilderness typical 
of the noblest woodlands of the East. 

Chief of all is the mingling of mountain and sea. The waves 
lash their abrupt rock-bound heights, beating hollows in their foun- 
dations, undermining the granite. From the mountain tops gor- 
geous views are revealed of sea and sound, island and wooded main- 
land. The air is now fragrant with the breath of the forest, now 
charged with the savor of the sea. The visitor has his choice of 
many pleasures. He may vary his days on the mountains with salt- 
water bathing, boating, sailing, and fishing. He may walk and 
motor; the park is surrounded by a fine water-side drive; roads 
cross it along the shores of Somes Sound. There are many hotels 
in Bar Harbor and other neighborhood resorts. 

Besides nature's rich endowment, history adds its charm. This 
was the first land within the United States which was reached by 
Champlain; it was in 1G04. The first European settlement in 
America north of the Gulf of Mexico was here. The mountains 
bear names which memorialize its French and English occupations 
and its many associations with the romance of the continent's early 
days. 

XV 
THE HOT SPRINGS RESERVATION 

Special Characteristic: Curative Hot Springs Possessing Radio-Active 

Properties 

A S different, almost, as possible from the great scenic national 
-t^ parks which we have been considering, but in its own particu- 
lar way as extraordinary as any of them, the Hot Springs Reserva- 
tion in the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas must be accorded a distin- 
guished i^lace among American resorts of national character and 
ownership. The reservation is the oldest national park, having re- 
ceived that status in 1832, 40 years before the wonders of the Yel- 
lowstone first inspired Congi^ess with the idea that scenery was a 
national asset deserving of preservation for the use and enjoyment 
of succeeding generations. 



64 



OUR NATIONAL PARKS. 




Hot Spiungs Reservation, Showing Bath House Row and the Army and 
Na\t General Hospital 

No esthetic consideration was involved in this early act of national 
conservation. Congress was inspired only by the undoubted, but at 
that time inexplicable, power of these waters to alleviate certain 
bodily ills. The motive was to retain these unique waters in public 
possession in order that they should be available to all persons for 
all time at a minimum, even a nominal, cost. 

The low, irregular mountain masses known as the Ozarks cover 
the greater part of southern Missouri and overlap northern Arkansas, 
where, in marked contrast with the surrounding plains, they become 
higher, more rugged, and heavily timbered. 

The country is one of much beauty. Hot Springs Mountain, from 
whose sides flow the cleansing waters, is about 50 miles west by 
south from Little Rock. Here, as early as 1804, began the settlement 
which has developed into the handsome prosperous city of 16,000 
inhabitants known as Hot Springs. It is a resort city, made wealthy 
from the many thousands of visitors seeking health from the adja- 
cent Government springs and pleasure in the high and beautiful 
neighborhood country with its excellent drives and woodland paths, 
its mountain and river views, its social gayeties, and its exceptional 
golf. 

Adjoining the borders of the city at the mountain's foot lies the 
reservation, a tract of 912 acres inclosing all the 46 hot springs. 
Eleven bathhouses are in the reservation and a dozen more in the 
city, all under Government regulation. There are also cold-water 



OTJK NATIONAL, PARKS. 65 

springs of curative value. In the city are many hotels and boarding 
houses with rates ranging from lowest to highest. The Department 
of the Interior has spent altogether more than a million dollars on 
the development of the reservation. The reservation contains, also, 
an Army and Xavy hospital. 

Dr. William P. Parks, superintendent of the reservation, states m 
his annual report for 1915 that while the baths are constantly given 
for such ailments as seem to be benefited in the experience of physi- 
cians who have prescribed their use and carefully observed the re- 
sults, there are still many physicians throughout the country who, 
never having themselves tested the springs, hesitate to send patients 
there. 

" Xo physician who is thorough and looks for the best results from 
the medicines he gives," says Dr. Parks, " would think of prescribing 
a drug whose physiological effects and therapeutic value had not 
been scientifically proven and described." 

A perfect explanation, this, of a natural scientific conservatism. 

The "War Department's years of experience in the Army and Xavy 
Hospital, however, is thoroughly convincing, and the medical staff 
officially affirm the waters marked curative value for rheumatic and 
many grave ailments more or less kindred. 

Recently the Xational Park Service has established on the 
reservation the Oertel system of graduated exercise which has proved 
so successful at the celebrated springs of Bad Xauheim, Germany. 
Courses have been laid out on the mountain slopes with distances 
scientifically established and plainly marked by monuments. The 
length and character of the walks are determined by physicians 
according to the condition and progress of the patient. 

INTERESTING INDIAN TRADITIONS 

Tradition has it that the curative properties of the hot springs 
were known to the Indians long before the Spanish invasion. It is 
probable that they were known to De Soto, who died in 1542 less than 
a hundred miles away. It is tradition that Indian tribes warred for 
their possession but that finally a truce was made which enabled all 
tribes to avail alike of their waters. 

Government analyses of the waters disclose more than 20 chemi- 
cal constituents, but it is not these nor their combination to which 
is principally attributed the water's unquestioned virtue in many 
diseased conditions, but to their remarkable radioactivity. The 
National Park Service will send full information to inquirers. 
125862°— 20 5 



66 OUR NATIOISTAL PARKS. 

XVI 

THE ZION NATIONAL PARK 

Special Characteristics: Vividly-Colored and Fantastically-Carved Sand- 
stone Cliffs Bordering a Deep Valley 

NOT many miles north of the Grand Canyon National Park the 
desert of southern Utah finds its most gorgeous expression in a 
deep canyon between sandstone cliffs of great height and vivid color. 
Here the famous Vermilion Cliff, whose brilliant red precipice 




Photograph by R. D. Adams 

Angel's Landing, Zion National Paek 

brightens more than a hundred desert miles, joins the glistening 
White Cliff, another desert feature of celebrity, the white overlying 
the red. Here, too, sandstones and shales of many other hues unite 
in dazzling combination. The canyon of Mukuntuweap River, cut- 
ting vertically down 3,000 feet, displays these colors in many majestic 
and fantastically modeled masses. 

This valley has been known to the Mormons since the late fifties, 
and Brigham Young named it Little Zion Canyon in 1861. A few 
years later it was explored and described by Government geologists 
and a few years afterwards reserved for scientific reasons under the 
title of Mukuntuweap National Monument. It was not until 1916 
that its amazing scenic splendor was made known to the public, and 
since then it has been entered by an automobile road and has become 



OUR NATIONAL PARKS. 67 

the resort of tourists. In 1918 President Wilson enlarged its bound- 
aries and renamed it the Zion National Monument. On November 
19, 1919, Congress elevated it to national park status as the Zion 
National Park. 

This gorgeous valley has about the same dimensions as the famous 
Yosemite Valley. Extraordinary as are the sandstone forms, the 
color is what most amazes. The gorgeous red of the Vermilion Cliff 
is the prevailing tint. Two-thirds the way up these marvelous walls 
and temples are painted gorgeous reds; then, above the reds, they 
rise in startling white. Sometimes the white is surmounted by a cap 
of vivid red, remains of another red stratum which once overlay all. 
The other colors are many and brilliant. The Vermilion Cliff rests 
upon 350 feet of even a more insistent red relieved by mauve and 
purple shale. That in turn rests upon a hundred feet of other 
variegated strata. 

Through these successive layers of sands and shales and lime- 
stones, colored like a Roman sash, glowing in the sun like a rainbow, 
the Mukuntuweap River has cut its amazing valley. 

Zion National Park is reached by an automobile ride of a hundred 
miles from the railroad through a vividly colored sandstone country. 
The entrance is between two gigantic stone masses of complicated 
architectural proportions which are appropriately named the Eastern 
and the Western Temple. 

The Western Temple is seen from a foreground of river. From a 
stairway of many colors, it springs abruptly 4,000 feet. Its body is 
brilliant red. Its upper third is white. The Eastern Temple, which 
rises directly opposite and two miles back from the rim is a thousand 
feet higher. 

Passing the gates the traveler stands in a canyon of nearly per- 
pendicular sides more than half a mile deep, half a mile wide at the 
bottom, a mile wide from crest to crest, whose walls blaze with color. 
On the west the Streaked Wall, carved from the Vermilion Cliff, is 
wonderfully eroded. Opposite is the Brown Wall, rich of hue, sup- 
porting three stupendous structures of gorgeous color, known as the 
Sentinels. Opposite these rise on the west the Three Patriarchs, 
Yosemite-like in form, height and bulk, but not in personality or 
color. 

Here, where the canyon contracts, we reach the comfortable public 
camp, terminal of the automobile journey. It is on the river side in 
a shady alcove of the west wall near a spring. 

A mile above the camp stands the most remarkable monolith 
of the region. El Gobernador is a colossal truncated dome, red 
below and white above. The white crown is heavily marked in two 
directions, suggesting the web and woof of drapery. Directly oppo- 



68 OUR NATIONAL PARKS. 

site, a lesser monolith, nevertheless gigantic, is called Angel's Land- 
ing. A natural bridge which is still in Nature's workshop is one of 
the interesting spectacles of this vicinity. Its splendid arch is fully 
formed, but the wall against which it rests its full length remains, 
broken through in one spot only. 

XVII 

OTHER NATIONAL PARKS 

THREE national parks which Congress created before the recogni- 
tion of the modern definition of a national park as a considerable 
area of supreme scenic or otlier importance may be briefly mentioned 
for completeness of record. 

PLATT NATIONAL PARK 

Sulphur and other beneficent springs, hot and cold, w^hich gush plen- 
tifully from an area of IJ square miles in southern Oklahoma, was 
the reason for the creation of the Piatt National Park in 1902. It 
lies in a high country of great beauty and delightful climate and is 
locally extremely popular. Approximately thirty-five thousand per- 
sons visit these springs annually. 

WIND CAVE NATIONAL PARK 

The following year Congress made a national park of a remarkable 
limestone cavern in the Black Hills of southwestern Dakota, not far 
from one of Custer's famous battle fields. Its name, Wind Cave, 
comes from a current of air which passes in and out of its mouth inter- 
mittently. The walls, ceilings, and floors of the many large and in- 
volved passages and chambers are elaborately and magnificently deco- 
rated with the fantastic formations usual in limestone caves. 

The park has a surface area of 16 square miles, a part of which is 
maintained as a national game preserve for bison, elk, and antelope. 

SULLY'S HILL NATIONAL PARK 

Local demand for national parks during this period resulted also in 
the establishment of a national reservation in North Dakota under the 
name of the Sully's Hill National Park. It is a rugged tract of pic- 
turesque forested hills bordering a lake. It is a wild-animal preserve 
and has historic associations. 



OUE NATIONAL PARKS. 



69 





72 



El Capitan from the East, Yosemite National Paek 

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